


Lacuna

by curled_edges



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, Emotional Manipulation, Gen, Kidnapping, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Season/Series 02, Stockholm Syndrome, Whump, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-25
Updated: 2017-03-08
Packaged: 2018-08-17 04:08:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 16
Words: 37,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8129905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/curled_edges/pseuds/curled_edges
Summary: Lacuna: A blank space or gap in something.If things had gone slightly differently, it would have been Beverly Katz's ear, not Abigail's, that Will Graham coughed up.A Beverly and Abigail-centric "for want of a nail" AU of season 2.





	1. Chapter 1

_Back o'er her pillow sinks her blushing head,_  
_Her snow-white limbs hang helpless from the bed;_  
_While with quick sighs, and suffocative breath,_  
_Her interrupted heart pulse swims in death._

-Erasmus Darwin,  _Loves of the Plants_

 

* * *

 

Beverly wakes up in a fog. Her throat hurts when she swallows, sharp and sandpapery, and the left side of her head aches fiercely. Sounds are muffled on that side, too. Something is beeping softly, although the sound seems to fade in and out at random as she dozes and wakes again. Opening her eyes feels like much too much effort.

The room smells . . . clean. Neutral. No, there’s a sweet smell. Flowers. And under that, bleach.

Someone speaks. It might as well be another language, for all the sense she can make of it. She swallows; it hurts. She lets out a dry wheeze of pain, and the someone speaks again.

“Ms. Katz?”

They — he — says something else, but her hearing is so fucked up she doesn’t catch it. Where is she? Footsteps. Faucet running. Footsteps again. A straw touches her lips. A hospital room? Yes. Yeah, that seems right. Bleach and flowers and pain — sure, a hospital.

She sips and swallows. The water doesn’t entirely do away with the sandpaper in her throat, but drinking it seems to clear away some of the fog. A few memories make themselves known. When she finishes the cup and the straw is taken away, she sighs.

“Did we get him?” Her voice is still rough, but that’s okay.

“Get who?” her doctor asks.

“Lecter.” God, what happened to her head? Her left ear is throbbing, now. “Hannibal Lecter. We get him?”

“No, Ms. Katz.”

The voice — the accent — suddenly clicks into place. Beverly’s stomach clenches in panic.

“I’m afraid you didn’t ‘get’ him.”

She hauls her eyes open. The white light in the room stings her eyes. For a moment, all she can see is a dark and featureless shape, sitting beside her on her bed. Horror settles onto her chest like an anvil.

Hannibal Lecter says, “Please, Ms. Katz, don’t scream. I’d hate for you to hurt yourself.”

 

* * *

 

He is methodical. Careful. But then, they knew that already. The Copycat Killer was never anything but impeccably, surgically precise.

The room is furnished almost like a typical hospital room: the bed with side rails, a sink and cabinets to one side, a collection of monitors and IV poles rising next to the bed like stalagmites. There’s even a curtain track around her bed, with the curtain pulled all the way back to afford her a view of her surroundings. There are incongruities, though. Her gown is a modest white nightgown made of cotton, not paper—sleeveless and soft. The cabinets and sink look more like they belong in a kitchen than a medical facility. And the floor, where she can see it, is concrete—the walls, white-painted cinderblock.

Methodical: he has a method.

The hospital bed is also equipped with a four-point restraint system. When she woke up, he had her hands tied down. Only when she starts to struggle and kick does Lecter restrain her ankles, tsking like a disapproving nurse.

And careful: he cares.

The flowers she smelled on waking are on a nightstand beside her bed. As Lecter cuffs her ankles, Beverly lies back, still groggy, and lets her eyes wander over them. A spear of white blooms in the center, surrounded by red flowers and shiny green leaves, and some white, frothy masses of blossoms spilling over the edge of the vase. The scent of them is very sweet.

“How’s your head?” Lecter asks, sitting beside her again. He pulls a penlight from his pocket. “Do you feel any nausea?”

Yes, he cares. The kind of care a farmer feels for a hog. And yet — the flowers.

“Any pain?”

“Am I dead?” Beverly croaks.

Lecter pats her hand comfortingly. “Not yet,” he says.

 

* * *

 

Will stares down at the ear in his sink, uncomprehending, for a long time.

Then he calls Hannibal.

_Don’t contaminate the scene_ , not like before, so he goes outside and sits on his porch, trying and failing not to wonder how this could have happened. Whose ear it is. How he even got home from the airport. He can’t remember. All he has to go on is the mud caked on his feet and an ear in his sink.

An _ear_.

He barely registers the sound of Hannibal’s car pulling up in the drive. When Hannibal comes up to him, he speaks because he has to.

“I went to Minnesota. I took Abigail. We went to Minnesota. She didn’t come back with me.”

“Show me,” Hannibal says, so Will gets up.

“You’re freezing,” Hannibal says, so Will lets him wrap a blanket around him.

“We have to call Jack Crawford,” Hannibal says. And Will nods.

He hears the SUVs roll up some time later, while he's pulling on clean socks. Outside, his property starts to sprout yellow caution tape. Home is a crime scene now. Bedroom is an accusation. Kitchen’s a grave.

Hannibal waits in the living room near the door. A few minutes after the agents outside arrive and start their work, Hannibal calls down the hallway, “Will. Jack’s here.”

He’s going to walk out of here on his own. That much, he’s decided. What happens next remains to be seen.

He comes out to the porch. Jack looks stormy; he radiates not only anger, but worry. Will meets his eyes with some effort of will. Jack looks back at him, unblinking, and Will feels him searching for something.

“I don’t know how this happened,” Will finally says, very quiet.

Jack eyes him. “How what happened.”

Will looks down.

“Where’s Beverly Katz, Will?”

He looks up, blinks. “W-what?”

“Beverly.”

Will looks past Jack, finally, and around the unfolding ant hive of FBI agents on his lawn. Jimmy Price and Brian Zeller are standing with their team of CSIs. Price is watching Will with suspicion — Zeller is watching him with naked anger.

“Where’s Beverly?” Will asks. Jack raises his eyebrows, and Will shakes his head, re-focusing himself. “I don’t — I don’t know.”

Jack is silent and stony for a long moment, studying Will. Then he turns to the two agents at the foot of the stairs.

“Process him.”

Some hours later, as Price and Zeller collect blood from under his fingernails and brush fibers from his shirt, it starts to sink in. Beverly is missing. Beverly is _gone_ , somehow, and they think he’s responsible for her disappearance.

Zeller is taking photos of the scratches on Will’s forearms when Will snaps out of it enough to say “I — need to talk to Jack.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Zeller says, with barely contained viciousness. “You’ll be talking to Jack.”

“It’s about Abigail Hobbs.”

Zeller pauses, then lowers the camera and gives Will a narrow look of confusion. “What about her?”

Will only says, “I need to talk to Jack.”

 

* * *

 

Go back a little. Start with how she got here. Let the river run backwards as you watch it.

It started when Will suggested that Cassie Boyle, Donald Sutcliffe, and Georgia Madchen could all have been killed by the same person. It was a ridiculous idea, on the surface. But one thing Beverly has come to realize is that Will’s ridiculous ideas are often accurate, at least partially. He sees something the others don’t — gives significance to things that the rest of the team thinks are meaningless details. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it, sometimes, often. But the results are the same.

So when Will put forward the idea that it could be a single killer, in spite of the varying M.O.s and geographical distance, Beverly listened, and thought.

The chain of logic started with the name they’d been using — the Copycat Killer — and with Sutcliffe’s murder. Beverly had studied copycats at the Academy, when she started to focus in on serial killers as a course of study. Copycats usually came out of the woodwork for highly publicized or sensationalized murders: a murderer leaves some Satanic mark on their victim, and three other murders crop up in the next six months where someone has written 666 in blood on the floor or drawn a pentagram on their victim or what have you.

Part of the psychology is just our tendency to imitate. We’re humans; imitation is built into our brains. Part of the psychology is a murderer’s desire to cover up his crimes by trying to attribute them to a serial killer. But the imitative urge is also what inspires people to call in confessions.

This is why investigators hold back details from the press. A confession can be ruled out if the possible perp can only describe details from the news; copycat murders can, to a certain extent, be identified as copycats if they fail to include details from previous murders. It’s an inexact science, to be sure — serial killers usually aren’t as consistent as the TV shows and movies would have you believe — but it’s part of an investigator’s toolbox.

Copycats can only copy what they’ve seen or read about, can only recreate the crimes that they have knowledge of. And there was the first stumbling block for Beverly, the first thing out of place: why would anyone copy Georgia Madchen’s murder of her friend? Who would have the details? Very little of the case had been released to the press, out of respect for Beth LeBeau’s family. In order to recreate her methods, the murderer must have had access to the investigation.

That was a disturbing thought. But the more Beverly held it in her mind, the more sense it made. Someone within the FBI would have had the details of the Minnesota Shrike case, including the ones about antler velvet in Elise Nichols’ wounds and the removal of her organs. They would have had all the information they needed to recreate Garrett Jacob Hobbs’ methods, or at least approximate them; they would have known how to imitate Georgia Madchen’s pathology. They even would have known where to find Madchen.

As unsettling as the idea was that she’d been working with a murderer, it at least narrowed the pool of suspects down to the teams that had been investigating a few specific cases. She sat at her desk in the BAU labs, with Beth LeBeau and Elise Nichols’ case files on one side, Cassie Boyle and Donald Sutcliffe’s on the other, and tried to see them the way Will Graham might.

The way Will might.

That thought was even more unsettling. Will has never been exactly what you’d call stable. _You’ve always been a little different,_ she told him once. The kind of guy who goes to a crime scene and thinks about how other murderers commit their crimes. The kind of guy who, not too long ago, contaminated a crime scene by picking the murder weapon and soaking his hands in the victim’s blood.

Unfettered and unique access to the investagtions’ files. Access to crime scenes. Relatively free movement, at least compared to the agents whose whereabouts could usually be tracked and accounted for at the FBI. But — and it was a big _but_ , as she pored over the file on Sutcliffe’s murder — it couldn’t have been Will. Whoever did kill Sutcliffe would have ended up with blood and tissue all over them. Will had been clean. And there’d been zero evidence that anyone had cleaned themselves up in the hospital. If only one person had killed Boyle, Sutcliffe, and Madchen, Will had to be taken off that suspect list.

Zeller and Price had alibis for most of the murders. Alana Bloom hadn’t consulted on Sutcliffe’s case, nor Boyle’s. It wasn’t unreasonable to think that she might have gotten access to the case files anyway, and it made a certain sense that a white female killer might be responsible for a string of killings that included two young white women. But, no, it didn’t fit. Alana had alibis for Cassie Boyle’s death, at least, Beverly was sure. And there was no way Alana could have overpowered Sutcliffe.

Jack Crawford was a reasonable suspect; he certainly had enough access to the case files. But Beverly had trouble imagining Jack killing anyone as elaborately as the Copycat had killed Cassie Boyle. He was more the kind of guy who’d just shoot someone if he was planning on murdering them. And he’d be more likely to dispose of a body than to display it, Beverly thought. Same with Price and Zeller. And besides, Jack didn’t have the anatomical knowledge or surgical skill to take out somebody’s lungs—

In the half-dark of the deserted lab, Beverly felt a chill go down her spine.

She opened up Cassie Boyle’s file again. Strangled to death. Mounted on a stolen stag’s head. Both lungs removed before death. While she was still using them. Removed with precision by someone who knew how to take them while she was alive. Someone surgical.

Someone with surgical knowledge, with a medical degree, would have had access to the hospital where Georgia Madchen was being treated. They would have had access to Sutcliffe’s office, too, probably. In fact, wasn’t — wasn’t it Hannibal Lecter that had introduced Will to Sutcliffe?

Wasn’t it Hannibal Lecter who came in to consult on the Minnesota Shrike case, just after Elise Nichols’ death and just before Cassie Boyle’s?

Didn’t Hannibal Lecter have who-knows-what kind of access to Will Graham, and everything he knew about the cases?

The idea was horrifying. Hannibal Lecter had never been anything but polite and charming to her. Hannibal was even there when they caught Devon Silvestri up to his wrists in his latest victim — he saved the victim’s life, for fuck’s sake. Was that the action of a serial killer?

Frankly — maybe. Maybe it was. Will had described the Copycat as an intelligent psychopath, a killer without a traceable motive or pattern. And a man who could put as much artistry into a crime scene as the Copycat had put into Cassie Boyle’s death, a man who could cover his tracks as carefully and competently as the Copycat had . . . sure. That was a man who could look a team of FBI agents in the face, save a man’s life, and smile.

One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

At least Beverly Katz was sure it could be so in Baltimore.

It wasn’t the evidence that convinced her. It couldn’t be; there wasn’t any. It was the fact that as soon as she put Hannibal Lecter and Copycat Killer in her head, side by side, like two fingerprints, it felt right. It was a sick feeling, cold. But it was unshakeable.

And unprovable.

There wasn’t a shred of evidence to link Hannibal Lecter to any of these murders. She knew he’d been in a violent struggle recently, and Tobias Budge had ended up dead, but one act of killing in self-defense didn’t make someone a murderer. All she had was a string of suppositions and circumstances, a chain of logic made of little more than guesswork and profiling. Jack wouldn’t accept it. Hell, _she_ didn’t want to accept it, just based on a gut feeling.

But she didn’t want to reject the conclusion, either. Gut feelings, her instructors at the Academy had told her, were there for a reason. They were what Will Graham worked on, more or less. They pointed the way towards avenues of investigation.

So, conclusion A: Hannibal Lecter fit the profile of the killer. Conclusion B, reached shortly after reaching conclusion A: further investigation was required.

Beverly spent the weekend in a distracted almost-haze, going about her errands on automatic. She cancelled plans with her family. Saturday night saw her sitting in her apartment’s living room until nearly dawn, with everything she knew about the cases written on the whiteboard she normally used for grocery lists.

If there was no proof that Lecter committed the Copycat murders, she would have to find some — or, conversely, find an absence of proof. There was no way she could get a search warrant on her own. And of course, there was no way Jack would approve an attempt to get one.

Sunday, after a pot of too-strong coffee that left her feeling slightly nauseated (or was the nausea from the things she’d been contemplating for the last forty-eight hours?), she pulled down her old text books from the Academy and spent some time reviewing some case laws.

Conclusion C: what she was considering doing was probably really illegal.

Monday, when she was sure Lecter would be in his office seeing patients, she drove to his house.

After that, things got fuzzy for a while.


	2. Chapter 2

_Never stray from the path, never eat a windfall apple, and never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle._

- _The Company of Wolves_

 

* * *

 

It’s easier than Will might have expected to get into Hannibal’s office: easy to slip through the foyer and up to the mezzanine in a moment when Hannibal is out of the room. There is a peace in this room, of sorts, and though it’s uneasy, it’s more peaceful and welcoming than anywhere else he can go right now. The red walls and rows of books are familiar. The orderliness of Hannibal’s mind on display here makes him feel like the organization of his own is possible.

He can hear Hannibal moving around on the floor below, the scritch of his fountain pen on paper. Will lets the sound lull him, fade into the background.

When he — and Hannibal, he thinks, who has been waiting too — is good and ready, Hannibal says, “Hello, Will. How are you feeling?”

Will considers the question. “Self-aware,” he decides.

“You frightened Dr. Bloom.”

He clocks the feeling of regret and pushes it aside. “She’s confused about who I am. Are you confused about who I am?”

“I’m not confused. I’m . . . skeptical. Meaning I’m willing to change my mind should the evidence change.”

“Do you believe I killed Beverly?”

The slight pause before Hannibal answers is answer enough. “I believe it’s entirely possible, if not nearly indisputable based on how you discovered her ear.”

“It doesn’t make sense. If it had been — if it had just been Marissa Schuur — or if it had been Abigail Hobbs, I would have believed.” He sees it again, Abigail gasping like a drowning fish as the blood ran down the antlers, the shock waves running through his arms into his shoulders. “I’d have believed I got so far inside Hobbs’ head, I couldn’t get out.” So desperate to keep her close to him, keep her a part of him, as Hobbs had been, that to see her and to honor her—

Don’t get lost in it. That hallucination wasn’t real. And the evidence found on him pointed in quite a different direction, like a compass spinning towards a magnet.

“Abigail?” Hannibal says thoughtfully.

Will blinks out of his reverie, glancing down towards the floor of the office. “Have they found her?”

“No, not yet.” Hannibal still sounds abstracted, as if his thoughts are elsewhere. “She’s found her way back from Minnesota before. But, Will — are you sure you didn’t harm her?”

Will looks away from Hannibal, into the shadows pooled and deepening before him. “I know who I am.”

“All sense of who you are has been distorted by your illness.” Hannibal’s tone is firm. Maybe firmer than Will’s convictions. “You know who you are in this moment. That isn’t always the case.”

“If I’d killed Abigail, there would have been evidence of it. The only blood they found on me was Beverly’s.” He closes his eyes and breathes in. “And I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill any of them.” He opens his eyes again. “Someone is making sure no one believes me.”

He hears Hannibal sigh, and doubt flutters around up towards him like a moth on that exhale.

“If we’re to prove you didn’t commit these murders,” Hannibal says, “perhaps we should consider how you could have. And then disprove that.”

_If_ beats its wings in Will’s ears, soft and insidious. _If if if if_.

“Fine.” He hauls himself to his feet, cradling his injured hand against his belly, and makes his way down the ladder. Hannibal moves from his desk towards the two chairs in the middle of the room, gesturing for Will to take his usual seat. Will lowers himself into the chair and meets Hannibal’s eyes as he does the same. “Then let’s prove it.”

 

* * *

 

 “It’s codeine,” Lecter says, holding up a tiny paper cup to show Beverly two small white pills. “Your ear must be hurting you.”

“What’d you do to me?” Beverly asks. The side of her head does hurt, sharp and throbbing. The idea of painkillers is appealing. The idea of doing anything Lecter wants her to, especially taking drugs with only his word to go on, is not.

“I took your ear.” He says it all matter-of-fact, nothing to be excited about. “And a few pints of blood. I’m afraid the FBI will need to find some form of remains.”

“Remains.” She stares at him. “Are you — aren’t you going to kill me?”

He shakes his head. “Not yet. Now, will you take these, or will I need to start a drip?”

Rapid calculations run through her head: if she takes the pills, she’s proving she’s cooperative, establishing some form of trust. If she refuses, he gives her an IV line and she has zero control over what he puts into her. Not that she has any control now, but even the illusion of it is worth . . . something.

“It’s just codeine?”

Lecter gives her a small, indulgent smile. “Would you rather only take one? It won’t be as effective, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re concerned about drowsiness.”

Beverly hesitates, torn, but finally nods. The concept _I took your ear_ is still hovering around her head. Hasn’t quite landed. The pain and the horror of the whole situation is keeping the horror of that detail at bay.

Lecter nods in turn, takes one pill out of the cup, and holds it up to her lips. The pill falls into her mouth and the coating starts to melt on her tongue before Lecter brings a glass of water with a straw to her. It’s incredibly bitter, metallic. Even after she swallows and drinks down half the glass of water, she can taste it at the back of her mouth.

“It will take a few minutes to take effect.” Lecter puts paper cup and glass down on the bedside table. “If you change your mind about a full dose . . .”

“Why are you doing this?”

Lecter gives her a look of faint surprise. “Is that the question you want to ask, Ms. Katz?”

“Why haven’t you killed me?” He doesn’t answer, just watches her. Maybe the look on his face is patience; maybe it’s just waiting. “Aren’t you the Copycat?”

Lecter’s eyebrows go up. “The murderer of Donald Sutcliffe?”

He sounds so calm. Beverly swallows. “And Cassie Boyle. And Georgia Madchen.”

Lecter nods. “Well done, Ms. Katz. And?”

Beverly blinks at him. “And what?”

“Ah. Those are the only three?”

“What do you mean?”

Lecter smiles at her again; then, cocking his head as if he’s heard something, turns and leaves her. He pulls the privacy curtain shut behind him.

“What do you mean?” Beverly repeats. No response comes.

Those are the only three?

That must mean there are more.

_That must mean there are more._

The pain in her ear starts to lessen, and her eyelids start to feel heavy. She falls asleep with panic rustling around her bed, and sleeps for a long, long time.

 

* * *

 

 Abigail walks until she’s left behind her hometown, until she’s outside the area where she risks running into someone who recognizes her. Minnesota is a spread-out state, up here in the northern half, away from Minneapolis. That means that “home” covers a lot of area, too.

Walking away from home yet again. You’d think at some point she’d stop doing this.

It would help if people stopped dragging her out here to talk about her father.

She wonders what Will Graham is doing now. Still back there at the cabin. Still in the room where Marissa died. She has the distinct sense that she dodged a bullet. Again. She’s looked into her father’s eyes often enough to know what imminent murder looks like.

After an hour, or a little longer, she hits the 53 and turns south. The sun is almost down. Her toes are a little numb, though not any worse than they’ve been when she was out hunting. She wishes she had some of the hand warmers her dad used to bring with them, though. She tucks her hands under her armpits and keeps an eye on the road for trucks.

Eventually she flags down a trucker who takes her to Duluth, and another that takes her as far as the bus station in Minneapolis. She uses every cent of cash she has left to buy a bus ticket to Baltimore. Nobody pays much mind to a girl on her own in a bus station.

Either that, or they pay too much. As Abigail wanders to the waiting area she notices a man eyeing her. Not a cop or a security guard, although she saw one of them glance at her as she passed — but that woman had simply noted Abigail as one of hundreds of passengers and then looked away. No, this man is another passenger. Expensive camouflage hunting jacket on his duffel bag, artfully faded band T-shirt, close-cropped hair.

He catches her looking at him and grins at her, nodding. He’s got high cheekbones, and his eyebrows meet in the middle, giving his whole face an odd, rude kind of attractiveness. Abigail smiles tightly back at him and drops her gaze.

She wishes she had one of Dr. Bloom’s books.

In spite of herself, she dozes off for a while. After the second time she jerks awake, she goes for a walk around the bus station to keep herself from falling asleep. When the time comes, she boards the bus and takes a seat in the middle, a few rows ahead of the guy with the hunting jacket and the monobrow.

The bus finally rumbles to life and rolls out of the station. Abigail closes her eyes. The exhaustion that’s been creeping after her for hours is finally catching up, but she doesn’t want to sleep yet.

“Are you traveling by yourself?”

She opens her eyes. Hunting Jacket is standing in the aisle next to her seat. She stares at him for a moment.

“Yes.” At this point, she can’t really lie and say she’s meeting somebody.

“Me too.” He gestures at the empty seat beside her. “Mind if I sit?”

Abigail has a strong, almost dizzying moment of deja vu. It’s like being through the looking glass. The hunter hunted.

“I’m really tired,” she manages after a moment.

Which Hunting Jacket takes as an invitation, apparently. He lowers himself onto the empty seat, perched at the edge like a dog waiting for permission to pounce on its food bowl. “You been traveling long? I mean, where’d you start?”

“Fargo,” she lies. She presses her cold hands together and sandwiches them between her knees.

Hunting Jacket’s eyes flick down to the movement, then back up to her face — though they stop at the scarf around her neck briefly. At least, that’s what it looks like to her.

(In group, the psychiatrist told her once that most people are a lot less observant of us than we are of ourselves. Abigail knows most people aren’t that observant. It’s still hard to shake the feeling that everyone can see what happened to her. Or, worse, see what she is.)

“That is a long way,” Hunting Jacket says. “You headed all the way to Baltimore?”

Another tight-lipped smile. “Yep.”

“Just visiting?”

“Are you?”

He grins. “Nah, going home. I was out here hunting.”

“You kill anything?”

“Nothing to write home about. Couple of does. Have you ever had venison?”

Abigail takes a breath, shakes her head. “I’m a vegetarian.”

“Oh.” Hunting Jacket looks a little disappointed, but rallies. “So what takes you to Baltimore?”

Abigail glances out the window. “Oh. I’m going to see my father.”

“So you live there?”

His face is reflected in the glass. It ripples in and out of view as they pass barren fields and power lines, but the lean, hungry expression is plenty clear, no matter how often the reflection breaks up.

For a moment, he looks a lot like Nicholas Boyle. If he has a knife on him, she could—

Abigail stands up, a single abrupt movement. Hunting Jacket leans back, his eyebrows going up.

“Excuse me,” she says, not looking at him, and shoves past him to the aisle. Closer to the back of the bus is a young woman also sitting by herself, a massive hiker’s backpack on the seat beside her. A phalanx of earrings frame the headphones tucked into her ears. She’s a few years older than Abigail and they look nothing alike: this woman probably weighs fifty pounds more than Abigail, and her hair is an asymmetrical jangle of fading teal dye. She glances up from her phone when Abigail approaches and pulls one headphone out of her ear.

“Hey,” Abigail says, “do you mind,” she glances meaningfully over her shoulder at Hunting Jacket, “if I sit by you? I won’t bother you, I just . . .”

The woman follows Abigail’s glance and immediately shifts to move the backpack. “Please, no problem. Be my guest.”

“Thanks.” She sits down gingerly, can’t quite keep herself from stealing a glance back up the aisle towards Hunting Jacket. He’s watching her settle in. That flash of deja vu hits her again; she closes her eyes.

“You okay?” her new seatmate asks, her voice low.

“Yeah,” Abigail says, a little too fast and emphatic. “I’m fine.”

“Okay . . .”

Abigail opens her eyes and glances over at the woman. Her first instinct is to put on an apologetic smile that she doesn’t mean, say something sweet and misdirecting. Stalk — lure. But this woman hasn’t done anything to deserve that.

Not that any of the girls did. Except maybe Abigail herself.

“Sorry,” she mutters, looking down at her hands. “I’m really tired.”

“Yeah. It’s okay,” the woman says. “Was that guy creepin’ on you? I won’t let ‘im bother you if you fall asleep or whatever.”

“Thanks.” She looks up again. “Thank you.”

The woman does smile faintly, now. “No problem,” she says again, and turns back to her phone.

Abigail leans her head back against the seat, closing her eyes. She needs to think about what she’ll do when she gets back to Baltimore. She’s going to have to tell people what happened — maybe she can tell the truth to Freddie Lounds, she doesn’t trust Will Graham anyway . . . But what about Hannibal? And what about the FBI?

But long before she can figure out a good lie, she’s asleep.

 

* * *

 

 “If you are this killer,” Hannibal says, that neutral therapist voice, “that identity runs through these events like a string through pearls. Cassie Boyle would have been your first victim. You said her scene was practically gift-wrapped.”

Will closes his eyes and brings Cassie Boyle to mind: her body bare except for the crows perching there. “It told me everything I needed to know to catch Garrett Jacob Hobbs.”

“You’d seen one of Hobbs’ victims,” Hannibal points out, “you knew how he killed. You may have been exploring how he killed to better understand who he was.”

“I wasn’t in Minnesota when Cassie Boyle was murdered.”

“She disappeared on a Saturday. Found her on a Monday. You would have had the weekend to do your work.”

“I know I didn’t kill her,” Will murmurs.

“How do you know? What did you think when you first met Marissa Schuur?”

The girl in the scarf — just like Abigail. “How much like Abigail she was?” Hannibal continues. The echo of Will’s own thought is eerie, so fast on the heels of his memory that it almost seems to overtake it. “Same height, same weight, same hair color, same age.”

“How could I resist,” Will mutters. In the shadows behind his eyes, he sees antlers, black blood, black hair.

“So much like his daughter, you may have wondered why Garrett Jacob Hobbs didn’t kill her himself.”

He did wonder. It was so easy to see the appeal of her. So easy to substitute her.

“Dr. Sutcliffe wasn’t killed how Garrett Jacob Hobbs killed,” Hannibal continues. Will thinks of Sutcliffe reclining in his chair. “He was murdered how you imagined yourself killing a woman only days before.”

Will nods in spite of himself. “The way Georgia Madchen killed.” Georgia, smiling through the glass; Georgia, smiling in death, her lips gone with the rest of her skin. “She said she dreamt I killed Sutcliffe. But she couldn’t see my face. And then she was murdered.” The stink of fat and smoke overpowering the smell of bleach.

“You catch these killers, Will, by getting into their heads. But you also let them into yours.”

“And Beverly?” Behind his eyes, he sees her ear in the sink, the edge slightly ragged. A conch that hears nothing. “Why would I kill her?”

“You were the one who suggested that these crimes could have been connected. Beverly Katz was in a position to investigate the plausibility of that theory.”

_“You’re clean,”_ Beverly says in the well of memory. _“You couldn’t have done this without getting something on you.”_ She stands in the Weaver stance, her gun trained on an unseen assailant. Will imagines fighting her: he has height and weight on her, but she has the edge on him in gunplay.

“Georgia Madchen had to die to prevent her from identifying you as Dr. Sutcliffe’s killer,” Hannibal says. “If Agent Katz confronted you, accused you of being the Copycat, she would have had to die, too.”

“Kill or be killed,” Will murmurs. He sees Beverly fall, rushed and tackled to the ground — sees her fight back. “But her body—?”

“What would Hobbs have done?” Hannibal says. Soft, insistent.

The lump in his throat, constricting, coming back up. The ear. Will swallows involuntarily. “Honored every part of her.”

He opens his eyes, and for a moment in the fading light of the office, Hannibal’s face is a mask of shadows.

“I’m trying to help you, Will,” Hannibal says.

“Then take me back home,” says Will. “I want to see where she died.”


	3. Chapter 3

_I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –_  
_The Stillness in the Room_  
_Was like the Stillness in the Air –_  
_Between the Heaves of Storm –_

-Emily Dickinson

 

* * *

 

Breakfast. She remembers it later like a story she heard about someone else. Breakfast in a high-ceilinged kitchen in a beautiful house. Beverly has no idea where they actually are; Lecter transported her while she was unconscious, sometime after she woke up in that hospital bed. The house’s eastern side seems to be all windows, facing out onto the steely waters of the Atlantic. From her seat in the kitchen, she can see where the land falls away. Whether there are neighbors, a road, anything else anywhere — she has no idea. This house could be the whole world, for all she knows.

“I should have asked before,” Hannibal says as he bustles around the kitchen. “Do you keep kosher?”

“Uh, no.” Beverly pulls her attention away from the view of the ocean and focuses it on Hannibal. The pain in the side of her head where her ear used to be is still intense when the painkillers wear off. Hannibal doses her with white pills whenever she wakes up, and the pain goes away, but whatever it is he’s giving her leaves her woolly-headed and easily distracted, prone to waking dreams. “No,” she repeats. Her gaze drifts back out towards the brightness on the water.

Hannibal adjusts the burner under a pot of water on the stove, adds salt, and pours a splash of vinegar in. The sharp smell brings Beverly’s focus back to him. She watches as he cracks two eggs into two ramekins. “Are you observant at all?” he asks.

“Not really. Not like I was when I was younger.”

“Piety comes naturally to children.” The water has started to simmer. Hannibal stirs it into a rapid swirl and slips the first egg from the ramekin into the pot. “As children, we live our lives submitting ourselves to higher powers. The gods our parents teach us to worship are extensions of our parents themselves. Some benevolent, some authoritarian.” Now the second egg. “As we become adults ourselves, we supplant our parents. And so, frequently, we supplant our gods.”

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him,” Beverly mumbles. The steam rising from the pot glows in the late winter sunlight.

“A brutal but elegant metaphor for an act of enlightenment.”

“You think killing is elegant.” She means for the sentence to come out as a question, but doesn’t quite succeed: it sounds accusatory, tired.

“Surely so does God.” He covers the pot and takes it off the heat. “I collect church collapses. God drops the roof of His house on his worshippers as they sing His praises. Twenty-two killed in Nigeria during the Easter vigil. Is that not elegant?”

“That doesn’t sound like my god.”

“It’s someone’s, though. The idea of the blood sacrifice is central to every major religion in the world. Even Abraham was asked to sacrifice Isaac.”

“No, but—” She shakes her head. “That’s the _point_. God stopped him. He wanted proof of obedience, not a human sacrifice.”

“Yet the sacrifice was still requested, and would have been carried out. The threat to Isaac’s life was real. The knife was real. The sacrifice was intended to be real, or Abraham’s obedience would have meant nothing.”

“But you’re missing — the point isn’t the sacrifice, the point is the mercy God shows by stopping Abraham.”

“Is such a test of faith truly merciful?”

Beverly blinks at him and frowns, leans her elbows on the cold surface of the kitchen island. “Why are we arguing about religion? You really want to do that?”

“It’s a fascinating topic,” Hannibal replies. His tone is as light as if they were at a cafe somewhere discussing the weather, instead of sitting in a house he abducted her to after cutting off her ear, talking about theology. “Don’t you think?”

The situation is so surreal that the only thing she can think of to say is: “Not before coffee.”

He nods, smiling faintly, unperturbed. “Perhaps it is a bit early for such things.” Across the kitchen, the toaster clacks and pops up. Hannibal turns away from her to gather plates.

The thought occurs to Beverly, slow and heavy, that in a kitchen you could kill someone with almost anything: a knife, a frying pan, fire, toxins. Spoiled for choice. She’s free — Hannibal hasn’t bound her or restricted her movement at all. Unless you count the codeine.

And by the time the thought has finished plodding through her mind, and she’s started to consider reaching for a knife, Hannibal is next to her with a plate of English muffins, poached egg, spinach, Canadian bacon. A perfect Eggs Benedict.

“No hollandaise,” Hannibal says, apologetic. “I simply can’t recommend anything that rich for you yet. Once you’ve recovered somewhat more.”

“Oh,” Beverly says. “Of course.”

Frightened and fuzzy with painkillers though she may be, she has to admit: the food is delicious.

 

* * *

 

Beverly’s room is a perfectly nice bedroom on the second floor of the cliffside house. It has a bed, a closet, a dresser, an attached bathroom. African masks hang on one wall, and a set of _noh_ masks hang over the dresser. When Beverly first wakes up there, another bouquet of flowers is on the nightstand, with that strong, sweet scent.

Only two things betray that it’s a cell, not a room: the door locks from the outside, and the windows are entirely blacked out. There’s no source of natural light. Beverly goes to sleep in the dark and wakes up in the dark.

After that first breakfast in the sun-lit kitchen, Hannibal brings her her food in her room at seemingly irregular intervals. With no light and no clocks, and with the painkillers making her drowsy most of the time, Beverly quickly loses track of how long she’s been here. The only real marker of change she has is her healing ear.

“It’s healing well,” Hannibal informs her one day, examining the scar. “I’m glad.”

“Are you.”

“Infections are a nuisance. How’s the pain?”

“Better.” She looks up at him from her seat on the bed as he puts away his penlight and gloves. “I want to stop taking the painkillers.”

He gives her a considering look. “We’ll start tapering your dosage, then.”

“Am I your hostage here or your patient?”

“Hostage is hardly the word. I’m not holding you for any sort of ransom.”

That’s — unexpected. And unsettling. When she’s been able to think about her situation, the only explanation she could come up with for her continued existence was that Hannibal was hanging on to her as some sort of bargaining chip. Not ransom, per se — she can’t imagine her family or the FBI agreeing to pay for her safe return — but some way of guaranteeing his own personal safety.

“. . . What did you do with it?” she asks.

“With what?”

“My ear.”

“I told you when you first woke up. I’m not surprised you don’t remember, though, you were quite disoriented.”

Not reassuring. Not that any answer he gives is likely to be. “What’d you do with it?”

“Left it where the FBI would find it.”

Beverly feels her eyes widen. “Like you did with Miriam Lass’ arm?”

Hannibal makes a thoughtful, amused moue. “Not exactly.”

“Then what?” A vague echo of the word _remains_ suggests itself in her mind; she isn’t entirely certain whether it’s a memory or a hypothesis. “Do they think I’m dead?”

Hannibal’s expression becomes solemn. His eyes are sharp on her face, reading the thoughts that show there like a hunter reads tracks in the snow. What does a person feel, at the news of their own death? What a Galilean moment must this be, when one’s universe re-centers around a future where they both exist and don’t exist?

“Do they?” Beverly repeats. She feels numb.

Hannibal nods, and Beverly catches her breath. “My family too?”

“I would imagine so,” Hannibal says, almost gentle now. “I can only speak to what the Bureau knows.”

She looks up at him and asks, more bewildered than anything, “Why? Why are you doing this? Why not just kill me?”

He crouches down in front of her; she draws back a little, but he makes no move to touch her. Just to look at her from this new angle, his posture somewhere between knightly and paternal. Gentlemanly either way.

“Only a few people have been able to see me before I chose to show myself to them, Beverly. You are one of those few.” His eyes search her face again, pass over the place where her ear was, her throat, her forehead. “For the time being, at the very least, I find the world more interesting with you in it than without.”

 


	4. Chapter 4

_When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw._

-William Shakespeare,  _Hamlet_

 

In prison, Will has a lot of time in which to replay the night he and Hannibal went back to his house.

 

* * *

 

The crime scene cleaners had already been there and gone by the time they arrived. It was late, nearing midnight, and there was no security around the place. Yellow crime scene tape fluttered in the cold wind, clattering and cracking like bone wind-chimes. Maybe now that the dogs were gone, the FBI figured there was no reason for Will to return. Maybe they didn’t have news of his escape yet, although he couldn’t imagine that.

He wasn’t sure how to profile himself, nor how Jack would profile him. Was he a criminal returning to the scene of the crime, or a confused, sick man who would simply wander after his escape? Was he an intelligent psychopath, now a fugitive, who would flee the country at the first opportunity? Or would he go back to Minnesota, to the antler room?

Was he Garrett Jacob Hobbs?

_(See?)_

Will kept a spare key to the main house in the toolshed, well hidden but easily accessible at the top of the dusty workbench. The FBI agents had cut the combination lock off the doors and left them slightly ajar. As he retrieved the key, he wondered what other surprises might be hiding around his property for the forensics team to find. Someone had tampered with his lures. The real Copycat had planted evidence there as cleverly as a heron dropping bait for its prey. Had he left other trails, too?

When he opened the front door, no dogs came to greet him. Their absence made the house feel like a corpse. Not just vacant: dead, lacking the breath and the blood that made the place vital.

They moved through the emptiness and Will noticed each moved item and missing piece with a feeling of distinct discomfort. The lures, gone to some lab to be disassembled — the jacket that hung by the door, gone to be brushed and analyzed — gone, gone, gone.

Hannibal led him to the kitchen.

A faint chemical smell hung in the air there, now, that Will couldn’t quite identify. He glanced into the sink as they passed. For a moment, he saw it as it was that morning, or however many lifetimes ago it was. He imagined he saw Beverly’s ear lying there, bile pooling in the drain.

Then he blinked. Gone.

“Here,” Hannibal said, on the other side of the counter. Will swallowed a lump in his throat, joined him.

Blood stained the side of the counter and the floor. Will took a harsh breath.

“Her throat was cut.” The words felt foreign in his mouth, and he took comfort in that feeling, somehow. If he could think of it as a scene where a stranger died instead of where Beverly met her end, then perhaps he could understand it. He can understand it. _You always said you interpret the evidence,_ Beverly says in his mind, the voice perched behind his shoulder somewhere. “There’s an unmistakable arterial spray.” He lifted a hand and traced the curve of it in the air.

“She would have died quickly, then,” Hannibal said.

“Is that supposed to comfort me?” The words tasted like the acid at the back of his throat. “Did they find anything else?”

“They haven’t found her body.”

“No. No, I know. I mean.” Will began to circle the room, his eyes tracking over all the tiny details. See the place as someone else would see it. See it as a stranger. See it as Beverly.

“I mean her gun,” he said, looking over the floorboards. “She was always armed. If she came here to arrest me, she would have been.”

”I’m not sure,” Hannibal said.

“I could have overpowered a girl like Cassie Boyle or Marissa Schuur,” Will said. His eyes moved up to the walls. Somewhere he felt that there ought to be a bullet hole. “But Beverly had training.”

“But you knew that. How would you have compensated?”

“I would have . . . I would have surprised her,” Will said slowly. He turned back to the blood stains on the kitchen floor and pictured the knife slicing across her carotid. “I would have come up behind her.”

“The way Hobbs held Abigail,” Hannibal said. Or Will thought. The two ideas were becoming harder to distinguish, Will’s thoughts leaping ahead of Hannibal’s voice, Hannibal’s voice dragging Will’s thoughts along like the Atlantic undertow.

“In Hobbs,” Hannibal said, “you saw something you recognized.”

“I saw . . . a darkness,” Will said. The evidence is there. He just interprets it. Something is waiting to slot into place. Sword into sheath. Gun into holster. “It assumed the shape of a man.” He turned towards Hannibal. Shadows swarmed over Hannibal’s face, settled in the hollows around his eyes like a mask. Hannibal looked into Will’s eyes with a cool, calm interest. “And then I scattered it.”

“At a time when other men fear their isolation, yours has become understandable to you. You are alone because you are unique.”

“I’m . . . as alone as you are,” Will said.

“If you followed the urges you kept down for so long, cultivated them as the inspirations they are, you would become someone other than yourself.”

“I know who I am,” Will said, slowly, and reached for his gun.

There were no bullet holes there. Beverly didn’t put any there. Her ear and her blood had been there, but Will no longer thinks that she was.

“I’m not so sure I know who you are anymore.”

Hannibal watched as the gun lifted to the level of his chest. Still calm. He was steady; Will’s hand was not. Now the house’s cold seemed to be penetrating into Will’s bones. He shivered.

“But I am certain one of us killed Beverly.”

It’s the moment patterns spring into focus. The moment the picture of the puzzle makes sense.

Hannibal said, with the logic of a mathematician, “Whoever that was killed the others. Are you a killer, Will? You. Right now. This man standing in front of me.”

The moment of certainty. The moment your feet touch bottom in the river and you launch upwards towards the glittering surface, lungs burning. “I am who I’ve always been. The scales have just fallen from my eyes. I can see you now.”

“And what do you see?” Under his words, Will felt Hannibal’s hunger like his own. Recognition is an ache devoutly to be wished.

“You called the Hobbs house that morning,” Will said. The first piece. “You were with us when we met Marissa.” Another piece.

“You said it felt good to kill Garrett Jacob Hobbs.” Hannibal cocked his head ever so slightly. “Would it feel good to kill me now?”

Will could almost laugh, almost did, tried to swallow it like a too-large pill. “Garrett Jacob Hobbs was a murderer. Are you a murderer, Dr. Lecter?”

“What reason would I have?”

“You killed Sutcliffe to hide something.” Another piece. He searched Hannibal’s eyes for confirmation. “Then Georgia to hide that, and Beverly — Beverly saw you. And you killed her. But there’s no one motive. That’s why you were so hard to see.” That laugh started to bubble up again. “You were just curious what I would do. Someone like me. Someone who thinks like me. Wind me up,” he said, all laughter gone in a rush of savagery, oh, it would feel good, wouldn’t it, “and watch me go. Well, apparently, Dr. Lecter, this is how I go.”

“Will—”

His gaze twitched sideways at the sound of his name. His eyes met Jack Crawford’s. Crawford advanced slowly, hand out. “Easy,” he said.

In a moment, less than a heartbeat, Will makes the decision. Or doesn’t. It isn’t a decision so much as a reflex. He lifts the gun to level with Hannibal’s face and watches Hannibal flinch.

Then Jack’s bullet slammed into his shoulder and sent him staggering back into the kitchen counter. He dropped, breathless; the gun fell from his hand to the floor with a clatter.

As Jack approached and carefully moved the gun out of Will’s reach, Will watched Hannibal move closer. He saw the antlers that haunt his dreams. How can Jack miss it, when Beverly found it out?

“See?” he murmured. Behind Hannibal, he could see Beverly nod, sadly, and he nodded back to her. “ _See_?”


	5. Chapter 5

_We are, I am, you are_  
_by cowardice or courage_  
_the one who find our way_  
_back to this scene_  
_carrying a knife, a camera_  
_a book of myths_  
_in which_  
_our names do not appear.  
-_ -Adrienne Rich, "Diving Into the Wreck"

 

* * *

 

Abigail finally reaches Baltimore as the sun is starting to come up over the coastline. Being here isn’t exactly a relief — there’s still the problem of figuring out what she’s going to do now — but it’s better than being in Minnesota. Or on that bus with Hunting Jacket.

Hunting Jacket is an immediate concern, sort of. Her temporary seatmate, who introduced herself as Dulcinea, got off the bus in Chicago. Hunting Jacket didn’t try to talk to Abigail again, but on one occasion when she woke up she caught him glancing her way. Now here they both are in Baltimore, and as Abigail eyes the exit from the bus station, she can practically feel him looking her way again.

Freddie Lounds? Her best option, probably, but her phone is dead and she has no idea where Freddie lives. Her only other real option is Hannibal Lecter, and she’s still not entirely certain how he’ll react to the news that Will Graham took her to Minnesota and then freaked out on her. Freaked out being an understatement.

He’s better than nothing, though. She starts towards the doors. Somewhere out there will be a taxi.

“Hey, Fargo.”

She recognizes Hunting Jacket’s voice, but not what he’s calling, so she doesn’t turn. Not until he calls “Pretty girl!” in a pitch that carries straight to her ear. She turns to face him.

With a jolt, as she watches him approach, she realizes that she would really like to kill him. And in fact, if he touches her, she might try.

She spins and runs for the exit.

Hunting Jacket calls something behind her, angry and jeering. Abigail doesn’t stop.

She doesn’t know Hannibal’s exact address. The taxi driver seems annoyed when she can only give him a set of cross streets nearby, but he takes her there anyway and drives slowly through the neighborhood, circling block after block until Abigail finally recognizes Hannibal’s house. His frustration increases when she tells him she can’t pay, “But my friend will if you just wait.”

“I am not going to wait. No way.”

Abigail opens her door. “I promise, it’ll just be a second and I’ll be right back, I promise.”

“I am not going to wait!” The driver turns off the engine and clambers out of his cab after her. Abigail starts to protest — and then gives it up, shaking her head.

Which is why when Hannibal opens his door, he finds not only a tired and travel-rumpled Abigail Hobbs, but an annoyed cab driver crowding behind her demanding she pay her fare.

Hannibal, for the first time that Abigail has ever seen, looks startled for a moment. Then he says “ _Abigail_ ,” with such genuine relief that it makes her feel warm in the chilly morning air, and pulls her into a hug. Abigail takes in a deep breath — he smells like wool and coffee — and relaxes for the first time in hours.

“I was afraid something had happened to you,” Hannibal murmurs against her hair. “No one knew where you were. I was so worried about you—”

“Will Graham took me to Minnesota.” Her voice is muffled.

“I know.” He lets go of her and searches her faces for a moment, then nods and gestures her into the house. “Go into the kitchen. There’s coffee, if you would like. Now—” He turns to the cab driver. “What can I do for you?”

Abigail gladly leaves them behind to negotiate, heading into the house. In the kitchen she finds his fancy silver and glass coffee maker just finishing its brewing. As she hunts through the kitchen for a coffee cup, she feels like there’s something different in here, that she can’t quite put her finger on. Something missing, maybe?

Granted, usually when she’s been in this kitchen, she hasn’t been in a great state to notice all the little details of it.

Hannibal comes into the kitchen as she’s fiddling with the spigot on the coffee machine, trying to get it to dispense. Smiling, he joins her at the counter and pours her a cup of coffee.

“There. Are you hungry? I’ve already eaten, but I’m happy to cook you something.”

“I’m all right.” That’s a lie, she’s starving, but it comes so naturally and reflexively that she doesn’t take it back. Her mom always said to trust your instincts. “Maybe later.”

Hannibal — watches her, for a moment. Studies her. Maybe lying wasn’t such a good idea, even about something as small as being hungry. But then he nods — the moment passes — and he leads her into the dining room. They sit at the table, Abigail at the head, Hannibal next to her.

The silence in the room is thick as snow for a minute. Abigail sips her coffee, letting the steam warm her cheeks, and wonders why she doesn’t feel more relieved.

“Are you ready to talk?” Hannibal finally asks. “What happened in Minnesota?”

Abigail swallows. “Will took me back to the cabin. But he — he started to act weird. Like something was really wrong with him. I didn’t feel safe with him, so I left. I got a bus back here.” She swallows again and looks from the table to Hannibal’s face. “He knows everything,” she whispers. “He figured it out, and — he got angry — you said he would protect me. Like you.”

“Will has been very sick,” Hannibal says. “His sense of the best course of action has been impaired. He should never have taken you to Minnesota in the first place.”

“He’s gonna tell, isn’t he.” It isn’t a question; it’s a conclusion she’s been trying not to come to. “He’ll tell the FBI, and I’ll — I’ll—”

Hannibal reaches out and takes one of her hands. “Will is not in a position to tell the FBI much of anything at the moment.”

Abigail blinks at him. “What? Why not?”

And so, in a level voice, Hannibal explains to her that Will Graham is in the hospital, recovering from some kind of encephalitis, while waiting to go to trial for the deaths of five people.

Including Marissa Schuur.

Abigail stares at him for a long time when he finishes speaking. When she finally finds words, they come out sounding a little strangled.

“Will killed Marissa?”

“They believe he did.”

That phrasing is off. Like whatever’s missing in the kitchen. Abigail puts down her coffee, lukewarm and bitter now, and rubs her hands over her face. They’re trembling.

“Anything he accuses you of now will be seen as either misdirection from his own crimes, or a delusion, the result of his own illness,” Hannibal continues.

“He won’t be sick forever.”

“But his actions while he was sick will forever be under suspicion.” Hannibal leans forward. “Do you understand?”

Abigail lowers her hands, meets his gaze. “Are you telling me what to say?”

“It’s the truth,” Hannibal says. “But it is also a truth that will protect you, for now.”

“For now?”

“Jack Crawford has had his suspicions for some time.”

“I know that. He dragged me in to identify Nick Boyle’s body weeks ago. What if he figures it out?”

“Will’s case is likely to keep everyone at the FBI occupied for the present.” Hannibal touches her shoulder. “Jack will be under scrutiny himself. That gives us time.”

“To do what?”

He considers her, then squeezes her shoulder gently. “We can make further plans after you get some rest. You look exhausted.” He stands. “I’ll call the hospital and let them know that you’ve been located. You’ll stay here tonight.”

“I think they’ll probably object to that,” Abigail mutters, numb.

“Let them.”


	6. Chapter 6

_I found out the crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it._

-Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

 

* * *

 

The first person Will Graham wakes up to is Alana Bloom.

It takes a few minutes after he regains consciousness for him to open his eyes and see her. Taking stock of himself comes first: the heaviness of limbs, the scratch of stubble, the hiss of oxygen. But when he does open his eyes, there’s Alana. She’s sitting in a chair at the end of the bed, reading silently. Will swallows, a dry click in his throat, and rasps, “No Flannery O’Connor?”

Alana instantly tenses. Even tired and aching as he is, he can see that. Still, she rallies enough to give him a nod.

“No Flannery O’Connor,” she agrees. “She’s a little — grim, right now.”

Will closes his eyes again. “How long has it been?”

“A couples of days. They’ve had you on” — she indicates the IV poles on either side of the bed — “antibiotics, antivirals, steroids. The whole kit and kaboodle.”

“What was it?”

“Encephalitis. Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. Your body was producing antibodies that attacked your own brain. Symptoms include confused thinking, memory deficits, disinhibited behaviors . . .”

Will cracks open an eye. “You been rehearsing?”

Alana presses her lips together, wry. “A little.”

“What happens when I get better?”

She takes a deep breath. “You’ll . . . when the doctors clear you, you’ll be transferred to the Baltimore State Hospital—”

Will makes a harsh noise of derision that turns into a cough. Alana goes to get him a glass of water, but he shakes his head. “‘M fine. It’s fine.”

“You should drink something.”

“I’m fine. I can’t be dehydrated, I’m on a drip.”

She presses her lips together again, but this time it’s in anger. Will feels an answering flare of frustration, although he’s too tired to follow it. There are more pressing things, anyway.

“Alana.” He swallows again. “Did they find Abigail?”

Alana blinks; he watches understanding draw across her face like a veil. “You left her in Minnesota. Sounds like she got back under her own steam. She’s — Hannibal is taking over full guardianship of her.”

“— _Hannibal_ is?” He starts to struggle to sit up and finds, with a dull sense of shock, that his wrists are restrained. “Alana, listen—”

“Will—” Alana comes forward and puts a hand out towards him, alarmed. “You’re still recovering, you shouldn’t get up.”

“Alana, Hannibal Lecter is _dangerous_. He killed Beverly — he killed all of them—”

Alana jerks back from him as if she’s overturned a rock and found a snake underneath. Will coughs again and winces in pain, dropping his head back to the pillows.

“I’m getting a nurse,” Alana says. She grabs the call button beside his bed. “You’re delirious.”

“I’m not delirious, Alana.” Although even saying it makes him feel desperate, disconnected. “You have to believe me.”

“Will—”

Whatever she was going to say is cut off by the arrival of the nurse, though, who orders Alana out of the room. Alana shoots one more pained look over her shoulder as she leaves. The hurt, the confused betrayal in her eyes leaves an acrid taste like gunpowder in his throat.

The nurse looks Will over as he takes Will’s pulse. “We just got you back in the land of the living,” he says, shaking his head. “Let’s try to keep it that way.”

“I need to talk to Jack Crawford.”

The nurse arches an eyebrow at him. “You need to lie still,” he says as he lets go of Will’s wrist. “And not that it’s any of my business, but if I were you? I’d want to talk to a lawyer.”

Will’s eyebrows go up. He blinks at the nurse, taken aback, less by the suggestion of a lawyer and more by what it says about what the nurse knows. “I . . .”

The nurse shakes his head. “Why did you do it?”

“I didn’t — I didn’t kill those people.”

It’s not a convincing answer. The nurse scoffs. The only questions he directs to Will after that are about how much pain he’s in.

Will doesn’t have very good answers for those, either.

 

* * *

 

He spends another ten days in the hospital. By the end, he can walk, dress, feed himself, keep food down. The headaches are gone, along with the fever chills and loss of time. His illness almost seems like a dream, like something that happened to someone else.

Later, he’ll look back on the time in the hospital as something like a reprieve. A time of quiet and lightness, compared to what came before and what comes after.

He leaves the hospital officially a man of sound body and brain. It’s the mind that’s the trouble.

After his prior escape from the prison van, they don’t take any chances with transporting him to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. His hands are shackled to his waist; his ankles are hobbled. He could tell them that he has no intention of trying to escape this time, but even he wouldn’t blame them for not believing him.

_Innocence_ is a thin sort of word. It hisses between your teeth, all rushing air and swallowed sounds. And it hides both sin and sense inside itself. Too much and not enough going on with innocence. It’s no sort of armor here.

Will thinks a lot about Beverly as he settles into the B.S.H.C.I. ( _Settles in_ , she would say. _Yeah, really nice digs. I love what you’ve done with the place._ ) She saw something in Hannibal Lecter. Was it the same thing he saw? Or did she find proof?

Did Hannibal Lecter bring her to Will’s house to die?

That macabre thought, at least, he dismisses. Obviously Hannibal is capable of a great deal. But he doesn’t think Hannibal would have killed her there if she confronted him elsewhere. Framing Will for her death seems almost like an afterthought. As if Hannibal had a spare body and thought he might as well put it with the rest. Like a child with a coloring book, adding more and more colors until the pictures are gaudy and unwieldy. After all, Will has no obvious motive for killing a friend like that.

He has — had — no obvious motive for killing any of them. And that’s what he told Jack, isn’t it? That the Copycat would have no traceable motive.

He hates being right.

He does hate other things more. The food here. The sour, watery coffee. Dr. Frederick Chilton’s clammy fascination with his mind.

The way Jack Crawford looks at him. Not as if Will is a broken or breaking teacup, now. As if Will was the bull in the china shop all along.

 

* * *

 

“Can I see her?”

“No. Absolutely not,” Alana says before Jack can answer Will’s question. “Abigail Hobbs has been traumatized and re-traumatized enough by all of this. She needs space to heal.”

“I . . . understand that,” Will says. The words, the thoughts that come with them, are halting. “I want to explain to her — what happened. In Minnesota. I want to talk to her about it.”

“You can’t expect her to give you closure on this, Will,” Alana says. She sounds like she’s trying and failing to sound gentle. “That’s something you have to find for yourself.”

”I am — searching for closure,” Will says, glancing down at the floor. “But that’s not why I want to talk to Abigail.”

“Why do you want to talk to Abigail Hobbs?” Jack asks.

Will’s mouth works for a moment, before he says, “So I can believe she’s alive.”

Jack and Alana exchange glances. Will catches the faintest nods from Jack, the tiniest tightening of lips from Alana.

“I’ll talk to Hannibal,” Alana says at last. Will has to suppress his desire to say no, don’t do that, you don’t understand. He manages it. He’s suppressing the desire to say a lot of things, lately.

“Thank you,” is what he says instead.

Alana and Jack are here to discuss his diagnosis and his defense — and, Will thinks, to check up on him. Alana’s anguish is still obvious, in the way she won’t meet his eyes for more than a second, the limp waves of her hair. Jack is no less anguished, but he subsumes his feelings into fury and determination. He always has.

“How are things at the FBI?” Will asks. It’s a deflection technique, and it’s transparent.

“The wheels are turning,” Alana says. Her eyes dart up to meet Will’s, then drop to the floor again. “To get your prosecution underway.”

“My case,” Will says. He glances at Jack. “Are you sure you should be here discussing this with me?”

“The Bureau isn’t exactly pleased with me, either.”

”Because you let the wolf into the henhouse,” Will mutters. “Or at least it looks like you did.”

Alana makes a move like she’d like to step forward and has thought better of it. “You didn’t know what you were doing, Will. Your brain was on fire. Whatever you did, it wasn’t your responsibility.”

“Not guilty by reason of insanity?” Will lets out a breath of laughter. “Has a nice ring to it.”

“Not insanity,” Alana replies, fierce. “Unconsciousness. You didn’t know—”

“It’s a distinction without a difference,” Will says. “Whether I — didn’t know what I was doing, or didn’t understand that it was wrong, the — underlying premise is still that I did it.”

“If you didn’t,” Jack asks, “who did?” Will starts and Jack holds up a hand to forestall him. “Don’t say Hannibal Lecter.”

Will ducks his head. “Then,” he says, flat, “I don’t have anything else to say.”

 

* * *

 

“Did you get in trouble much when you were in school?”

The Hare Psychopath Checklist. Of course. Will sits in what Frederick Chilton refers to as a therapy cage — a set of words that seem diametrically opposed — and listens to Dr. Chilton’s questions with only half his brain. He knows the questions. He’s gone through them before.

Never on this end of them, though.

“No,” he says, flatly. Thinks of school: moving around. Being the new kid. Big enough or smart enough to avoid trouble from the kids at the top of the pecking order. Report cards with the average grades and the note _William seems withdrawn_ and not much else.

Chilton glowers. “Any trouble with the law as a youth?”

“No.”

“You know, of course, that I will be verifying your answers, conducting a _thorough_ ” — he throws the word — “background check.”

“And if I’m lying, I earn two points under ‘pathological lying’ instead of the one you’re probably writing down now.”

“Precisely,” Chilton says, sour and prim. “I will repeat the question. Were you ever in any trouble with the law as a youth?”

“No,” Will repeats. This is a lie. Sort of. He stole things when he was a kid — broke a neighbor’s greenhouse and never admitted it — committed and got away with the minor criminal acts that most people consider typical of a red-blooded American boy.

Chilton makes an extremely emphatic mark on his file and moves to the next question.

“Have you ever violated probation?” He looks up at Will from under his eyebrows. “Given your . . . dramatic escape during transfer, I believe we can say ‘yes’ to this item.”

Will decides not to point out that escape from a prison van is a pretty far cry from violating probation or parole. He looks past Chilton, instead. Thinks of a river. Someplace far from here. Open.

“Are you sexually promiscuous?”

“—What?” Will blinks. The river flickers away, like a badly threaded film reel.

“Do you frequently engage in casual sex?”

_(I can’t just have an affair with you.)_

“No,” he says. Flat, again. Still. Deliberately so, this time.

“Does that question bother you?”

Will very nearly sighs. There’s an unmistakable salacious undertone in Chilton’s voice, a victorious tinge, as if he thinks he’s found some chink in Will’s armor.

“I don’t engage in casual sex.”

“A little on the defensive side,” Chilton murmurs. “Have you ever been married?”

“No.”

Will can tell he’s disappointed. “Engaged?”

“No.”

Chilton scribbles something. “Tell me, have you actually had any meaningful romantic relationships?”

He can’t quite bring himself to be flat this time. Even though a lie would be hard to disprove, and the truth makes him vulnerable. He murmurs, “None worth mentioning.”

“It seems as though you have very few meaningful relationships of any sort,” Chilton says, adding as if it’s an afterthought (it’s clearly not an afterthought), “apart from the relationship you built with Jack Crawford. And Alana Bloom’s touching concern for you.”

That stings. And it annoys Will that it does, since it was so obviously meant to. “No wedding ring on your finger, Dr. Chilton,” he says, a little snappish. “You react to Dr. Bloom like a man who feels threatened by her. Always have. Do you have so few meaningful romantic relationships yourself you feel you have to take it out on the women around you?”

Chilton, to his credit, doesn’t react strongly to that. It may have only been a glancing blow, but a blow it was. Will doubts it was worth it; the petty satisfaction of scoring one on Frederick Chilton, of all targets, doesn’t last.

“ _Very_ defensive.” Chilton notes it down. “But, Will, you have not addressed the question. Evasiveness reflects poorly on you.”

“I didn’t hear you ask a question.”

“Would you say you have many meaningful relationships of any sort?”

His first thought — one that comes with the sick feeling of betrayal — is of Hannibal. Then he thinks of Abigail, who won’t see him, whether because she doesn’t want to or because Hannibal won’t allow it as her guardian. The difference is immaterial.

Then of Beverly. The one person he knew he could call to help him find reality when he wasn’t sure which direction to go. The one person whose murder he couldn’t accept — as if even in death, she could point him towards truth.

Was it personal? Did Hannibal kill her to hurt him, or just because she became inconvenient? Was it their friendship itself that was becoming inconvenient? Was the pain it caused him, and Jack, and Zeller and Price, was that just incidental?

He answers Chilton’s question in a low voice: “Not anymore.”

He stops listening to any other questions Chilton asks him after that. He thinks of the river, and the mist off the water, gold in the sun, and he practices his cast until Chilton gives up and leaves him alone. For the moment, anyway.

Sometimes, when they’ve left him alone in his cell, the handcuffs off and the electric locks on, the echo of his thoughts off the stone walls all he has for company — he thinks he sees Beverly. She paces back and forth, or she leans against the bars of his cell, dried blood staining her shirt and skin burnt sienna, and she is as real as the feathered stag that haunts the halls of his mind. Realer than the halls of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

That irony isn’t lost on him.

_Hey, teacher,_ Beverly sings with a crooked smile, _leave them kids alone._


	7. Chapter 7

 

_But you mustn't cry for that bird, Paulie. ... After awhile it forgot the cerise color of the sun dying behind Kilimanjaro._

-Stephen King,  _Misery_

 

* * *

 

Before Will Graham's sickness, before Minnesota, before going missing, Abigail had a standing appointment with Freddie Lounds to talk about her book. Now that she's back, Abigail finds herself looking forward to it with a mixture of uncertainty and relief. She sort of wants to tell Freddie that she wanted to call her when she got back to Baltimore. She also sort of feels childish for wanting to tell her. Either way, it'll be a tiny piece of normalcy. The new normal.

Freddie is wearing a bright red tiger-print dress under a gray tartan blazer when Abigail arrives at the coffee shop. She stands up when she sees Abigail come in the door, holding out her arms for a hug. Abigail lets herself be embraced.

She’s been getting a lot of hugs lately. It’s tiring.

“You _have_ come through a storm, haven’t you?” Freddie asks as they sit down. “Do you want something to drink?”

“Um — no, thank you, I’m fine.” Abigail ducks her head, glancing around the cafe. “Are you sure this is the best place to meet? It seems really — public.”

“We can go somewhere else if you’d like,” Freddie offers immediately. “I just wasn’t sure if your new guardian would be inclined to let me take you away from your house.”

“Probably not,” Abigail admits. “He’s — protective.”

“Mm.” Freddie has this habit of putting her head on one side when you’re talking and widening her big blue eyes. The effect is simultaneously disarming and odd. For a tabloid journalist, her stare can be awfully penetrating. “I got that sense.”

Then she straightens up and looks down at her notebook, all business. “But you must be relieved to be out of that hospital.”

“I am,” Abigail says. She smiles faintly. “Hannibal’s house is a lot nicer than that place. No more group therapy.”

Freddie smiles back at her. “Of course. Now, I wanted to talk to you about what happened in Minnesota, with Will Graham.”

Abigail tenses up. “Do we have to?”

Freddie’s eyes flick from the notebook up to meet Abigail’s gaze. “It’s an important part of your story. Not only did you survive your father killing all those girls — you came this close” — she holds up her gloved forefinger and thumb about half an inch apart — “to another mass murderer. One who thought he was close to your father.”

“. . . How do you know that?” Abigail asks. Under the table, in her lap, her hands are clenched around each other.

“I have my sources within the FBI,” Freddie says. She waves the question off. “It adds spice. It’s a good button on the end of the story. Escape — recovery — another close shave — the end. Happy endings. Don’t you think?”

_It doesn’t matter what I think, you think,_ Abigail thinks, a little annoyed. “I’m only nineteen,” is what she says. “I don’t think I’ve got my happy ending yet.”

“That’s the problem and the beauty of memoirs,” Freddie says. “You have to end them at a narratively satisfying spot. But you can always write sequels. Worked for Leonard Nimoy.” She raises her eyebrows and takes a sip of her coffee. “Do you want to go somewhere else to talk about Will Graham? Or should I buy you a coffee for here?”

In the end, she buys Abigail a coffee to go. They go for a walk in a nearby park, where Abigail still can’t shake the feeling that they could easily be overheard, or watched. Freddie doesn’t seem too concerned about this when Abigail brings it up.

“It’s true that you’ve got a certain level of notoriety,” she explains, “but you’re more anonymous than you think.”

“You’re not,” Abigail says.

“I’m eye-catching,” Freddie says with a smile. “It’s not the same. Now.” She digs in the pocket of her jacket for a recorder and clicks it on. “Where should we start?”

“I — I’m not sure.”

“Will Graham took you to Minnesota on a Sunday, right?”

“That’s right.”

“What did you think about when he took you to the airport?”

“I was thinking about how it was going to be my mom’s birthday soon. My mom and dad and I had been planning to go climb Eagle Mountain to celebrate.” Repeating all this feels a little hollow. Reminds her of how shaky and pale Will Graham had looked on the plane as they boarded. “And I thought it was a little — weird, that he wanted to take me back to my dad’s cabin.”

”That’s where you went?”

Abigail nods. “And when we got there he — started to act weird. _Really_ weird.” It helps that this is true; it makes it easier to keep the story straight. It’s not about lying, just about leaving things out. “I didn’t feel safe. You told me before you saw a killer when you looked at Will Graham.”

“Yes,” Freddie says. “It’s such a shame I turned out to be right.”

“I guess I saw a killer when I looked at him in there,” Abigail says. She swallows. “So I left. In a hurry.”

“You ran?” Freddie suggests.

“Yeah, I ran. I ran until I couldn’t run anymore, and then I walked.” Freddie nods approvingly, so Abigail barrels on. “When I got to the road I hitchhiked. Got a ride with a trucker.”

“Were you afraid?”

Abigail blinks at her. “Of the trucker?”

“Right.”

“No, not at all,” she says, faintly bewildered.

“Mm, well, maybe we’ll punch that up. Or maybe we can spin it as a Good Samaritan sort of thing.” Freddie waves a hand. “Did you hitchhike all the way back to Baltimore?”

“I caught a bus.” She looks down at her coffee cup. Wisps of steam are escaping the hole in the lid, dispersing in the chilly winter air. She had hitchhiked before, when she went there to uncover Nicholas Boyle. Keep it straight. “Not really that exciting. Maybe Greyhound will sponsor the book. Official bus line of girls on the run.”

Freddie lets out a bright, humoring laugh. “Maybe. Is that all there is?”

“That’s all there is.” Abigail shrugs. “It sounds less scary like this than it was.”

“Being alone in the room where all those other girls died with Will Graham sounds plenty scary,” Freddie says. “What went through your mind then?”

Abigail takes a deep breath. She had been expecting something like this question. So had Hannibal. He hadn’t pushed her to answer it, but he had encouraged her to think about it. “I thought — I’d gotten so close to dying in my house. And now I was so close to dying in my dad’s cabin. Just like how my dad—” Her voice breaks; she presses on. “Like how my dad killed all those other girls. And I just thought — I had to get out of there. I had to get away from there.”

”From him?” Freddie says.

Abigail shrugs. She finds she’s a little reluctant to say too many bad things about Will Graham. She doesn’t trust him, it’s true, and he’s always been sort of — possessive. But he was sick. He cared about her at one point, even if he doesn’t anymore. A lot like her father.

“You know what he’s been accused of?”

“Some of it,” Abigail says, nodding. “I know they think he killed Marissa. And Cassie Boyle.”

“And a doctor of his, and a young woman who saw him.” Freddie puts her head on one side again. “And an FBI agent.”

“That Asian woman, right?”

“Beverly Katz, yes. They think he killed her Sunday night.”

Abigail frowns. “They do?”

Freddie nods. “You sound confused.”

“It’s just — he was in Minnesota with me that evening. I mean, the sun was going down when I left. And he seemed really sick.”

“Mm,” Freddie agrees. “Amazing what some people are capable of.”

Abigail blinks, and then looks closely at Freddie. There’s something about her wide-eyed expression, guileless and blank, that makes Abigail very suspicious.

“Do _you_ think he killed all those people?” she asks, her voice low.

Freddie raises her eyebrows, purses her lips thoughtfully, and clicks off the recorder. “I think Will Graham has certainly killed _someone_ ,” she says. “And I think you’re safer now that he’s behind bars. But he’s not my problem.”

Abigail nods, slowly. She’s very aware of Freddie’s eyes on her. She sips her coffee rather than meet Freddie’s gaze.

“Let’s go back to the car,” Freddie says, after they walk for a minute or so in silence. “I’ll drive you wherever you want to go.”

 

* * *

 

At first, Beverly only experiences her bedroom and the attached bathroom. She tries the bedroom door once and finds it locked. For a few “days” after that — she counts days as the time between sleeping and waking, lacking any other method of keeping track — she could only focus on basic bodily functions. Drink a can or two of the meal replacement Lecter leaves for her. Use the bathroom. Take a painkiller. Sleep. Heal.

The next time she tries the door, it opens. That, in and of itself, is a surprise. And though she doesn’t quite trust it, she can’t help venturing out of the room, with its blacked out windows, and into the long hallway outside.

Like her room, like the kitchen she somewhat remembers, like Lecter’s house in Baltimore, there’s a subtle sense of wealth here, evidence of money and taste combined. The ivory carpet is luxurious under her feet, and the warm gray walls have a few classical paintings on them. Several doors open off the right side of the hallway. One opens to the left — she eventually surmises this one must lead to the rest of the house.

Pretty soon, Beverly knows this upstairs suite as well as she knew her own apartment.

The bedroom that was her whole world for the beginning of her time here feels almost like home, now. There’s the bedroom, the bathroom, the hallway; the study with its one bookshelf and its desk and hotplate and mini fridge; and a few locked doors. All of the windows are permanently shut and covered in blackout material. She knows the carpets. She knows where the floorboards creak, although still not well enough to avoid the noisy spots.

She was always detail-oriented.

One day, Lecter knocks on the door to the second floor. The knock is a courtesy, not a request. The door locks from the outside, and the door is always locked.

(Beverly has tried it before. She tried it every “day” for six or seven days before she stopped. For a while, anyway. Trying and failing every day felt too bad to keep it up. Then _not_ trying started to feel just as bad, so she decided to try it again. The results were no different: she still felt a little piece of hope crack and crumble every time she tried the knob and failed to turn it. But if she was going to feel hopeless either way, she may as well feel hopeless because she’s doing something than because she’s doing nothing.

Does that make any sense? Who knows?

She wishes she could ask Zeller. He's good at this stuff.)

Lecter knocks. She’s in the study, which is more or less opposite the door that leads to the stairs, the door Lecter opens a moment later.

“Hello,” he calls, cheerfully. Beverly doesn’t make any sound, which doesn’t matter. As there are a limited number of places she could be, and the study is so close to the stairs, Lecter finds her almost immediately. He’s carrying two very full grocery bags. He gives her a smile and steps past her to start restocking the fridge.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

“Tired,” Beverly says, then corrects herself. “Bored.”

Lecter half-turns to look at her. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

He really sounds like he means it. He usually does, come to think of it. He always sounds so sincere, so caring. Beverly reminds herself that he’s killed people, and then immediately reminds herself that killing doesn’t necessarily mean that he couldn’t care about another person.

“Would you like to talk about it?” he asks her.

Beverly frowns at him. “I’d like to go outside.”

“Ah.” He starts unpacking the bags. Beverly blinks at the groceries, and then snorts. “Yes?”

“Ramen,” Beverly says, jerking her chin at the packets in his hand. ”I already feel like I’m living in a dorm room, and here’s the finishing touch. Although, admittedly,” she adds, glancing around the study, “my dorm room was never this nice.”

Lecter chuckles and stands up, brushing off the knees of his slacks. “You’ll have to forgive me for the substandard fare,” he says. “If it were possible, I would cook for you more often.”

“Why isn’t it possible?”

“Alas, even I must be away from home at times. It’s a regrettable truth of professional life. I would imagine that you would understand that.”

Beverly shrugs. “I guess so.” Then, quite unexpectedly, she feels a lump in her throat and tries to swallow it down. “But I would give—” she starts, her voice tight as she forces it past the constriction. “ _God_ , what I wouldn’t give for some takeout pad thai.”

And just like that, she can’t help it: there are tears in her eyes. She ducks her head. Crying jags, great. That’s new. Over _ramen_ , for fuck’s sake, and in front of the man holding her captive, too. She sniffles hard and tries to get it under control.

With a rustle of clothing, Lecter moves closer. Beverly doesn’t lift her head, but he doesn’t ask her to. He simply stands next to her, with one hand on the back of her chair, and says very gently, “Beverly. I want you to close your eyes. Keep them closed for a count of ten, then open them for a count of ten. Then close them again, and so on. Try and breathe in when your eyes are closed and out when they are open. All right? Close. And inhale—” A noisy inhale. “One, two, three . . . eight, nine, ten. Open them, and exhale. Ten, nine, eight . . .”

She doesn’t listen to him for the first cycle, but when he begins the second one she can’t tune him out. So she closes her eyes for a count of ten, steadying her breathing; opens them to a view of her hands lying limp in her lap, and her breathing starts to hitch again for a count of ten; closes them for a count of ten; opens them for a count of ten. Hannibal’s voice is low and his cadence is steady as a metronome.

It does help.

“—Seven, eight—”

She looks up at him, her eyes feeling heavy and tired but no longer stinging with tears. Lecter stops counting and examines her expression. “Better?”

“Better as I’m going to get,” she says ruefully.

Lecter’s lips curve up into a small smile. “Of course.” He straightens slightly and glances over his shoulder at the fridge, then seems to make up his mind. “I don’t have the right ingredients for pad thai,” he says, “but would you like me to cook for you?”

Beverly blinks at him. “What?”

“Perhaps pho,” he continues, half to himself. “I think that ought to be possible to approximate with what I have in the house.”

“Can I — can I come down to the kitchen?” Beverly asks, hardly daring to hope. The world beyond the door that leads to the stairs seems like someplace she hasn’t traveled in a long time. Even if that world is just Hannibal Lecter’s sun-lit kitchen.

“Of course.” Lecter’s smile widens. “I like to have someone to talk to while I cook.” He steps back a little and offers her a hand. “If you’d like to join me. I would understand if you would rather not, of course . . .”

“I would,” she says quickly. She ignores his hand, though, as she stands. “Thank you.”

Even as they walk out of the study and down the stairs, she finds herself thinking that this is just smart psychology on Hannibal Lecter’s part. He’s kept her in the dark, isolated, trapped, for who knows how long. Over a week, surely. Maybe even longer than that. Now, he makes an overture of kindness by comforting her when she cries — a carefully calculated one, not too intimate but not too cold — and offers her special privileges.

Basic interrogation techniques. Take everything away and the prisoner will be grateful for anything that’s offered back to them. The bad cop takes and threatens; the good cop coddles and creates trust. It’s just that he’s both the good cop and the bad cop. Or the good doctor and the bad doctor, in this case.

This being the case, she’s somewhat suspicious of her own gratitude. But that gratitude is strong enough that it’s hard to keep suspicion in her mind.

They exit the stairwell and Beverly inhales sharply. Out through the floor-to-ceiling eastern windows is — blackness. The night sky. She had been expecting sunlight, for some reason. The darkness startles her, even disappoints her for a moment — then the pleasure of the open space down here on the main floor, and sight of the sky and stars, takes over any other feeling. She moves towards the large windows that look onto the patio. Hannibal makes no move to stop her.

The stars are incredibly clear. Beverly has never seen them like this. At the window, she rests the back of one hand against the cold glass, and chill points on her knuckles make a constellation of their own. Her eyes drink in the distant lights in the sky.

(It isn’t just gratitude for being out of her room that takes her gaze upwards. After a minute, she locates the Big Dipper in the northeast, off to the left and almost out of sight. That’s good. But when her eyes scan the horizon, she can’t find a glow that would indicate a city. No matter where she looks, there are just cliffs, or water, or dark.)

“Where are we?” she murmurs, not quite aware that she’s spoken audibly.

“Beverly.” Lecter’s voice behind her, though gentle, startles her. She turns. “I can’t tell you that.”

She opens her mouth to protest, then shuts it again, pressing her lips together.

“I can tell you that we are a long way from civilization,” Lecter continues.

“Then can I go out on the patio?” She feels like a child, asking like that, hates the feeling. Hates it more when Lecter shakes his head like a parent. Tries not to sulk.

“Now then.” Lecter nods towards the kitchen, brisk now. “Dinner?”

Dinner, then. Home-cooked pho with the good doctor. Conversation, stilted and inconsequential though it may be, with another human. And afterwards, he walks her upstairs, and he wishes her good night, and he locks her in, and she tries not to cry for the loss of the stars.

 

* * *

 

Hannibal sets Abigail up in a guest room on the second floor of his townhouse, where the window overlooks the street. The walls are lined with bookshelves, and the bed is a queen-size, tucked up against the street-side wall. There isn’t much in the way of closet space, but then, Abigail doesn’t have much to put in a closet, anyway.

Abigail wanders around the edges of the room, her neck craned sideways to read the titles of the books, while Hannibal finishes making the bed for her. A lot of the books are about medicine or psychology; some are in languages other than English.

“How many languages do you speak?” she asks absently.

“English, Lithuanian, Latvian,” Hannibal answers, straightening the bedspread, “Italian, French, Latin . . .”

“Wow.” She turns away from the books and raises her eyebrows with a critical air. “Only, what, six? You’re slacking off.”

“Seven.” Hannibal grins at her; the smile transforms his face from austere to almost boyish. “A smattering of Japanese, to round things out.”

“Why so many?”

“I find that to truly appreciate a work of art, one must consume it in its original tongue. Only that way can one appreciate the subtleties of the text.” He comes to stand next to her at the bookshelves, reaches out to brush one finger down the spine of a book. _Balta Drobulé_ , the title reads. “Language shapes our thoughts. It defines the very ways in which we are able to think. Think of it like liquor — each liquor has an appropriate vessel that allows the palate to appreciate it most fully. In the same way, language is the vessel for ideas. The proper vessel of language allows for the fullest expression of the artist’s ideas. Serving brandy in a pint glass won’t ruin the brandy, but it will never give you the full experience.”

“I’m not old enough to drink,” Abigail murmurs.

Hannibal smiles at her again. “Only in America.”

“There’s a word for that, isn’t there?” She drifts over to her bed and sits on it to peer out the window. “For concepts that a language doesn’t have a word for. Lacuna.”

“That’s right. From the Latin, _lacus_. Pond or hole.”

“Like ‘lake.’”

“Or ‘lagoon.’”

“Minnesota’s the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes.” Down on the street, a car passes. There’s a constant susurration of traffic from somewhere out of sight. “Ten thousand holes. Think that says something about the people who live there?”

Hannibal sits down on the bed next to her, drawing her focus back to him, and leans his elbows on his knees. “A lacuna may be a gap in our language, but that need not be a negative thing. Those gaps prompt us to fill them with more knowledge, better understanding. The silence of a lacuna gives context and definition to whatever surrounds it — music, language, texts.”

“Like negative space.”

“Precisely.”

“What about holes in people?” She meets his eyes. The question is skirting the edge of challenging — it feels a little dangerous. “Do those define us?”

Hannibal looks back at her steadily. “That is up to you.” Then, “This book you’re planning with Miss Lounds. What lacunae will it include?”

A soft thrill of anxiety goes down Abigail’s back. She drops her gaze, tucking her hair back behind her ears. “What do you mean?”

“Parts of your story will have to be left out.” Hannibal is still as stone, his gaze unmoving. “The gaps you choose will define more than just your own story.”

“You know I’m not going to tell Freddie about what happened to Nicholas Boyle,” Abigail says, her voice low. “Or about — you, calling the house.”

“Or about the ways in which you helped your father.”

“No. Not that either.”

”And what will you write about what happened with Will in Minnesota?”

Abigail looks up now, and blinks at him, confused. “I’ll — tell the truth. I told her the truth. That Will took me to the cabin, and he scared me, so I left and I hitchhiked back to Baltimore.”

“Is that what will go in your book?”

“Yes.” She frowns at him. “You — you told me that people blaming Will for the Copycat murders was the best thing that could happen for me. That everyone will be focusing on him instead of me.”

“The misdirection has its uses, that’s true,” Hannibal concedes. “But Will is facing life in prison, or in the mental hospital, at the very best. At worst, he faces the death penalty. Without our help—” Hannibal looks down, as if the thought is painful and he needs a moment to compose himself. “I don’t like to think of the consequences.”

“. . . I’m confused,” Abigail manages after a second. “Are you — do you want me to recant what I told Freddie or something? Do you want me to say Will Graham acted totally normal when he took me to Minnesota? Because he didn’t. I thought he was going to _kill_ me.” Her voice is starting to rise and shake. She makes an effort to rein it in, but only succeeds in making it quieter, not steadier. “I feel a hell of a lot safer with him behind bars than I did when I was around him.”

“Will has been very sick.” Hannibal’s voice, in contrast, is so steady you could build a house of cards on it and never lose a level. “He cannot be held responsible for his actions towards you. He may not even be responsible for these murders. That is certainly what his legal defense team will attempt to argue.”

“Do _you_ think he’s not responsible?” Abigail asks. For all that the room is quiet and serene, she feels as chaotic inside as she ever has. “Do you think he did it? Killed all those people? Or do you think he’s innocent?”

“The evidence points towards him. And Will has the desire to kill inside of him.” Hannibal meets her eyes. “In that way, you and he are very much alike.”

And something — clicks.

Abigail feels very cold.

”Are you and I very alike in that way, too?”

Something flickers in Hannibal’s eyes. Something like — pride? Something like the look in a cat’s eyes before it pounces?

He doesn’t say anything, though, and Abigail feels the tidal pull of the silence on her voice. “Will always said that whoever called the house that day was a serial killer. _The_ serial killer. That was you.” Hannibal nods and Abigail takes a shaking breath. “Why did you really call?”

“I wanted to warn your father that the FBI was coming for him.”

“Why?”

“I was curious what would happen.” He puts his head on one side. “I was curious when I killed Marissa. I was curious what you would do.”

Her heart is pounding in her ears. “You — wanted me to kill Nicholas Boyle. Didn’t you?”

He nods. “I was hoping. I wanted to see how like your father you are.”

Abigail shudders involuntarily. Hannibal puts a hand out to touch her shoulder and she jerks backwards, away from him. “ _Pleasedon’t_ ,” she says in a rush. Hannibal nods again and draws back, giving her plenty of space.

“Nicholas Boyle is more important for you killing him,” Hannibal says. “He changed you. That’s more important than the life he clamored after. And killing him made you feel powerful, didn’t it?”

Yes. No. She isn’t sure how to answer. _It made me safe. It put me in danger._

What she says, finally, is, “How many people have you killed?”

Hannibal nods, very slightly, as if he was expecting the question. “Many more than your father.”

“Did you kill all of them? All the people they think Will killed?”

Hannibal watches her a moment, then says simply, “No. Not all of them.”

“Did Will kill any of them?”

“No.”

She breathes in, breathes out, breathes in. Asks, “Are you going to kill me?”

“I am going to protect you, Abigail.” There is a sincerity in his voice that probably ought to be comforting. She isn’t sure how it feels yet. “I give you my word on that.”

“My dad wanted to protect me, too,” Abigail snaps. “So he killed girls that looked like me. He tried to kill _me_. He was going to make it all go away. Is that how you’re going to protect me?”

“No.”

“ _Tell me the truth!_ ”

Hannibal’s eyebrows twitch, but the force of her shout otherwise doesn’t seem to faze him. “Are you going to make it necessary for me to kill you? Because I have no wish to, Abigail. I want you here with me because I care about you. And because we can protect each other.”

“With our secrets,” she breathes. “You want me to keep this a secret, too.”

“Yes. Just as I’ve kept — and will continue to keep — yours. And perhaps the two of us will be able to protect Will, too.”

Abigail presses her back against the wall, pulling her knees to her chest, and presses the heels of her hands to her forehead. She’s in a room with a murderer. Again. But she’s always in a room with a murderer, points out a voice in the back of her mind — she can’t get away from blood and bone and the bitter taste of adrenaline, not when killing is in her deep under the skin, right to the heart of her.

Why would he go to the trouble of becoming her guardian if he just planned on killing her? Why let her go talk to Freddie if he planned on killing her? He could have made her vanish when she was still considered missing. He could have told everyone that Will had killed her in Minnesota.

And instead he’s setting up a bedroom for her.

The horror starts to recede a little. When she puts her hands down and looks up, Hannibal is still seated at the foot of the bed, his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped, waiting.

“I’m scared,” she whispers.

Hannibal nods, and then moves — slowly, though, giving her plenty of time to see and guess what he’s doing. When he settles next to her and puts an arm around her shoulders, she doesn’t shake him off.

“I know,” he says softly. “But you don’t have to be scared of me.”

“You kill people. You kill a lot of people.”

“That’s true. But not you. And I will keep you safe.” He hugs her a little closer, rubbing her arm with his hand. “You told me once that you wanted to work with the FBI.”

“Yeah,” Abigail says, dully. “Fat chance of that now.”

“Don’t be so quick to dismiss your chances. You have the opportunity to shape both of our stories, now. And I’m still working with Jack Crawford. I will protect your interests as if they were my own.” He leans over so he can see her face. “Because your interests _are_ my interests, Abigail.”

“And vice versa,” she says. He has something on her. She has something on him.

In history class, they called this mutually assured destruction.

It’s a kind of peace, isn’t it?

She takes a deep breath, her shoulders rising to press against his arm, falling with the weight of his embrace.

“So — okay. What do you need me to do?”

Hannibal smiles at her. And he tells her. And she understands.


	8. Chapter 8

_Judges will haunt you, the country priestess will want you_  
_Her worst is better than best_  
_I've seen all these decoys through a set of deep turquoise eyes_  
_And I feel so depressed._

-Bob Dylan, “No Time to Think”

 

* * *

 

“You have a visitor.” The orderly spins his keys around his finger, catches them in his palm with a small, musical crash. He holds up a set of handcuffs in his other hand. “You know the drill.”

Will has no idea who might be visiting him — Alana was here just recently, and he isn’t expecting her to come back for a few days at least. But the orderly is waiting, and a trip to the visitation room is better than staring at the walls of his brain. It’s an actual shock, therefore, when he’s sitting in the visitation room, hands shackled, his eyes resting on the middle distance, and Abigail Hobbs comes into the room.

For a moment he feels like he might be seeing things. She has her hair pulled back and a scarf tied around her neck; a sharp-lined blazer over a blouse and jeans. She’s clutching a messenger bag in front of her like a shield.

Will feels a hum in the back of his head, a sustained tone like a TV set tuned to an empty blue channel, and for a moment has the urge to stand up and — do what? Welcome her? Offer her a chair? Embrace her? Shake her hand?

There is much, much, much too much information in her eyes when they meet his. Fear. Worry. Suspicion. Uncertainty. The faint pinkness and swelling that comes with too little sleep. Mascara. She never wore mascara before: she was a well-scrubbed homespun Minnesota girl, used to the woods and hard work, more at home with guns than eyeliner and blood than lipstick.

“. . . Hi,” Abigail says after a moment. She sounds like she’s prompting. _This is how we say hello._

“H— hi,” Will replies. He drops his eyes to the table, breaking the too-strong eye contact. “Abigail.”

“That’s me,” she says, with a strained, rueful brightness. “Do I . . .?”

“You can sit, if you want.” He gestures towards the chair on the opposite side of the table. The chain attaching his hands to the tabletop jingles softly. “Or you can stand, if you want. You, uh — shouldn’t come to this side of the table, though.” Without looking up at her, he nods towards the glass door that leads to the hallway, where the orderly is slouching against the wall. “They frown on that.”

“Why?”

He forces a smile, as if humor will remove the sting from the words. “Because I’m dangerous.”

“Right.” She pulls the chair out. Will catches her faint wince when the legs scrape against the concrete floor. She sits down gingerly. She isn’t sure what to do with her hands. She keeps them on the bag in her lap.

There’s a pause.

“. . . How’s things?” Will asks, with another forced smile. They both know this is strange. They both know—

“This is wrong in about seven different ways,” Abigail mutters.

Will sighs, his smile fading away. “I know. Um. You — wanted to see me?”

“Hannibal,” she starts, and glances up at him. “Hannibal thought I should talk to you.”

Hearing the name makes something in his gut twist. “He did?”

“Mm-hmm. He thinks it might be therapeutic for both of us to — talk about what happened.”

“I . . . see.” Will watches her for a moment. “Do you want to? Talk about what happened?”

“You know,” Abigail says, almost meditative, “ever since my dad tried to kill me people have been saying it would be therapeutic for me to talk about what happened. Talk about what happened in the kitchen. Talk about what happened before that. Talk about what happened after that. Talk about what happened when I was asleep, when I was awake, when I was . . .”

She stops and takes a deep breath. “I don’t really want to talk about what happened.” She cuts her eyes sideways at the door, the waiting orderly. “Can he hear us?”

“No,” Will says quickly. “He can’t.” The slightest emphasis on _he_ ; Will isn’t certain if Frederick Chilton is listening to this room the way he listens to every other room in the hospital, but he certainly suspects it. He takes a breath of his own, mirroring hers. “This room is, uh, private. Supervised, but — private.”

Abigail makes a face, not quite a smile but definitely rueful. “Supervised privacy. Yeah. I hate hospitals.”

“You and me both.” His smile this time is more genuine. “But, if you don’t want to — talk about Minnesota — we don’t have to.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Will blinks, drops his gaze, blinks again.

_(Abigail’s feet dangle inches from the floor as her eyes widen; the antlers make a terrible wet cracking sound as they go through her chest. She looks betrayed. He wants to tell her, See? See what I am? See what you made us? See?)_

“I — I’m sorry,” is what Will says. He can’t look at her. “I, uh — I wasn’t well. I scared you, I know that. I’m sorry.”

He can hear their breathing when he stops talking. He isn’t sure what else to say, or do. So he waits.

“When I was little I had a teacher who told us we shouldn’t say ‘that’s okay’ when people apologize to us.” Abigail shifts, leaning over to put her bag on the floor, and straightens again. “Because then it made it seem like — I don’t know, like their apology wasn’t worth anything, or like they hadn’t actually done anything worth apologizing for.”

“Or both,” Will murmurs.

“Yeah. So.” Breathing. “I don’t think I can say ‘apology accepted,’ either.”

“I understand.”

“Sorry.”

Will’s lips quirk up, sad but amused. “No, it’s okay. Actually. You don’t have anything to apologize for.”

Another silence, but this one is tenser. He glances up and finds Abigail worrying her lower lip and glancing towards the orderly again. “You’re sure he can’t hear us?” she asks.

Will shrugs; the chain clinks. “Pretty sure.”

Abigail nods and lowers her voice. “Did you kill Marissa?”

When she asks it, he realizes he’s been expecting the question. What other question is there?

He doesn’t shake his head. Too obvious. Instead, he murmurs, “No, Abigail.”

“Please don’t lie to me,” she whispers.

“I won’t lie to you, Abigail. If you’ll make me the same deal.”

“Don’t lie to me and I won’t lie to you? That kind of deal?”

He nods, slightly. “That kind of deal. Quid pro quo.”

Abigail meets his gaze. Did she always have that much calculation in her eyes? Yes — yes, of course she did. She was the lure. She always knew how to play some people in, when to give slack and when to keep tension. Calculation, and the uncertainty and worry that have been lying there since she walked in. She looks, Will thinks, like a creaking covered bridge: dark and unsteady and liable to collapse.

“Okay,” she says. “Deal.”

Will doesn’t think she means it. But she said it. It’s something. He nods.

“Deal,” he says. “I didn’t kill Marissa Schuur, Abigail.”

“Do you know who did?”

“Did you know what your dad was doing?”

Abigail tenses up, leaning back in her chair, her spine going ramrod straight. If she were a dog, her hackles would be raised. Will tries to stay very still, barely breathing. Abigail’s eyes narrow.

“You do know,” she murmurs, her tone creeping towards accusatory. “Don’t you?”

Will shrugs. _Clink_ , goes the chain. “I’ve told people who I think did it. They didn’t believe me.”

“Try me.”

And with a jolt — Will looks at the set of her jaw, the ferocity in her eyes, the way her hands are clamped on her knees — Will realizes, _she knows_.

He looks at her from under his eyebrows and breathes, “It was—”

And Abigail joins him when he finishes “Hannibal Lecter.”

The breath that carries the name feels like the wind before the atomic shock wave and the incinerating light: hot and heavier than you could ever imagine. Will feels a little as though that breath could knock him over.

“How long have you known?” he whispers, after a second or two of radioactive air.

“Not long,” Abigail says. She barely moves her lips when she speaks. Her shoulders are practically vibrating, she’s so tense, and when Will leans forward impulsively she jerks.

“You have to relax,” Will says, “or at least try to act like it. They’ll notice something is wrong otherwise.”

Abigail draws herself up, hunches her shoulders, and blows out a breath. Her shoulders go down, fractionally. “You’re a mass murderer,” she says. “They’re not going to think it’s weird if I’m tense around you.”

“No,” he agrees, sitting back again. “You wouldn’t be the only one. How did you find out?”

“I put it together.” She lifts a hand to her scarf and the scar hidden beneath it. “I’ve got some experience with — you know.”

“He knows you know?”

Abigail nods.

“Abigail — you need to stay away from him.”

Abigail lets out a harsh laugh under her breath. “That’s going to be hard. He’s my guardian now. I want him to be.”

Will blinks at her, thrown. “You — want him to be your guardian? Even though—?”

“Do you think Agent Crawford—?” she starts, then changes her mind abruptly and says, “Agent Crawford suspects me of being involved with — what my dad did.” She laces her fingers on the table in front of her. Her knuckles are white. “If you and Hannibal — if you _or_ Hannibal tell him what I, what I, I did do, he’ll throw me in jail. If I’m lucky. But Hannibal won’t. Will you?”

“You—” Will stares, aghast and starting to feel angry. “You’re saying you want me to keep your secret. And his.”

“I didn’t say anything about his.”

“Why,” Will says, trying to keep his voice low, “would I do that?”

Now the look in Abigail’s eyes is _(betrayal)_ just fear. Fear of him. Of Jack Crawford. Terror.

“Do you want me to go to jail?” Abigail whispers.

“No — no, but—”

“Then don’t tell anyone. You haven’t told anyone yet, have you?” This is only barely a question. “They would have come after me already if you had. So you haven’t.”

“I wasn’t sure that what I remembered from the cabin was real,” Will says. He can see Abigail’s expression turn stricken with the realization that she’s walked herself into further trouble.

“Look,” Abigail murmurs — swallows — continues, “I said I wouldn’t lie to you, so I won’t. It really did — happen. You figured it out. You figured out I was . . .” She trails off, swallows again. “But you must not have told anybody.”

“. . . No,” Will admits, finally.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

“I didn’t want to do it,” Abigail whispers. “Not any more than you wanted to kill my dad.”

Will’s stomach lurches a little. He doesn’t think that was a calculated barb — he doesn’t think she knows him, or herself, well enough for that — but he won’t discount the possibility. Discounting Abigail Hobbs is going to prove a mistake for somebody.

“Please don’t tell anybody,” she continues. “Not yet anyway. Please?”

“That’s what he asked me to do,” Will says, “when he told me about Nicholas Boyle.” Abigail barely flinches at the name — he only sees her eyelids twitch because he’s looking for it. “He asked me to protect you and then he put me in here.”

Abigail takes a breath — and pauses. Something is happening behind her gaze, rapid planning and weighing.

“What if I could help you get out of here?” Abigail says slowly.

Will’s eyebrows go up, disbelieving. “How would you do that?”

“I don’t think you killed that FBI agent.”

“—You.” The sentence has trouble getting out of his throat. He feels like he just knocked in the head by an unseen tree branch. “You what?”

Abigail sees a chink; she presses her advantage. “Beverly, right? That was her name? I don’t think you killed her. Freddie Lounds said they think you killed her the night you were in Minnesota with me. But I don’t think you could have gotten back in time to kill her.”

“Not, you don’t think I _couldn’t_ have killed her,” Will observes, not quite bitter. “Just that the timing doesn’t work.”

“I thought you were gonna kill me,” Abigail says sharply. “So, no. But I could testify that you were in Minnesota with me. I know how long it take to get from the cabin to the airport. I know how long the flight is. The time doesn’t work. Does it?”

Will hesitates. There’s something going on here that he isn’t following yet, forces or incentives working on Abigail that he doesn’t quite have a handle on.

“You would be willing to testify to that,” he says. He makes no particular effort to keep the doubt out of his tone.

Abigail shrugs, another jerky movement. The unspoken half of the deal on the table is pretty clear, no words necessary: _keep my name clear and I’ll help clear yours._

”I don’t know if it would help,” he says slowly, and shakes his head.

“Couldn’t hurt,” Abigail says.

“It wouldn’t clear me of the other three murders.”

“Maybe I could look for proof,” Abigail begins, and Will cuts her off with a sharp, loud, “ _No_.” Abigail’s eyes go wide, startled, and outside the glass wall the orderly looks over his shoulder, mildly intrigued.

“No,” Will repeats, forcing his tone back to something like calm. “If you try and get something out of Hannibal, or find something around him, he’ll be able to tell. And if he thinks you’re putting him in danger there won’t be anything I or anyone else can do to keep you safe. Do you understand?”

“I don’t want to put Hannibal in danger.” Her voice is shaking, ever so slightly. “That’s not—”

“That may not be what you want,” Will says, “but those are your options. If you actively try to help me, you’ll be putting him — and yourself — at risk.” Saying it costs him something: “You’d be better off letting me take the fall.”

“That’s not what I want either,” Abigail says. She sits back. Will sees tears in her eyes; about the same time he sees them, she dashes them away with the heel of her palm. “I don’t want anyone else to die.”

Will breathes in, breathes out. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

Abigail, her eyes on the table, shakes her head. “You’re a little late for that.”

And a sharp rap comes on the door, and the orderly opens it to drawl, “Time’s up, miss,” and Abigail snatches up her bag and walks stiffly out of the visitation room.

And Will isn’t sure what, if anything, is decided now.


	9. Chapter 9

_The present is an empty space_  
_Between the good and bad_  
 _A moment leading nowhere_  
 _Too pointless to be sad_

-”The Past Is Another Land,” _Aida_

 

* * *

 

At breakfast one morning, Hannibal puts two keys on the table in front of Abigail alongside her coffee. Abigail picks them up, blinking.

“What’re these?”

“The front door” — he indicates one of the keys — “and the back gate. I’ll be gone this weekend. You’ll need these.”

“You’ll be gone?” she asks, uncertain. “Where are you going?”

“I have a few overnight errands to run out of state. If all goes well I may be back sooner, but I expect to be gone two nights.”

Which doesn’t sound suspicious at all. In spite of her better judgment, Abigail asks, “What kind of errands?”

“Nothing nefarious,” Hannibal says. He smiles at her. “I own a rental property in Delaware that requires some regular attention. The winter was hard on it.”

“Housework.”

Hannibal’s smile widens into that almost boyish grin of his, self-deprecating and amused. “Unfortunately, yes.”

Abigail smiles back at him, wry. “Have fun. When are you leaving?”

“I’ll be seeing patients until five, and leaving from the office.”

“Taking the car?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Abigail shrugs. “No worries. I have a bus pass.”

“Good.” He starts for the kitchen, pauses, smiles at her again. “I’m glad to have you here, Abigail.”

She smiles back at him over her coffee, nods. Keeps the expression on her face until he’s out of the room.

 _Going to do some work on the cabin_. That’s what he would tell her mom. And the easy domesticity — here’s the key, make sure you bring in the mail, can I borrow the car, no maybe next time — makes the comparison that much easier to see.

“So when are you getting back?” Abigail calls towards the kitchen.

“I’m not certain,” Hannibal calls back. “Monday morning at the latest.”

“Call when you’re on the way?” She adds a little humor to her tone — just like she would with her father. “So I can clean up from the party, you know.”

There’s a brief silence from the kitchen. Abigail wonders suddenly if she’s miscalculated.

Then she hears Hannibal’s chuckle, quiet but carrying, and she relaxes. Hannibal comes into the dining room with plates in hand, sets one in front of her.

“Would you like to throw a party?”

Abigail raises her eyebrows and shakes her head. “Who would I invite? My friends are all in Minnesota.” Or dead. “None of them talk to me anymore, anyway.”

Hannibal nods thoughtfully as he sits down. “Perhaps we should plan one anyway. It’s been a while since I had a proper dinner party.”

Abigail’s mouth twists sideways before she can stop herself. “I, uh, I don’t think I’m ready to be a good dinner party conversationalist. Not . . .”

She trails off. Hannibal cuts into his eggs and puts a piece in his mouth, watching her as he chews. After he swallows, he prompts her, “Not?”

“Not — with this whole situation.” She shrugs uncomfortably and waves a hand at the table, the dining room, the house. “Living here instead of the hospital.” She drops her eyes to the table and adds, low, “Knowing everything I know.”

“One more secret to keep,” Hannibal murmurs. She can feel the weight of his gaze still on her. She pokes at her food. “I understand, Abigail.”

She bites back the question _Do you?_ and starts eating, to give her mouth something to do, an excuse not to talk. Eventually she hear Hannibal start eating as well, feels less like she’s being watched. The silence lasts most of the meal — which is, thankfully, short. Hannibal finally speaks as they begin to clear the dishes. “I’ll call you when I leave Delaware,” he says. “Do you have plans for the weekend?”

Abigail shakes her head. “Maybe I’ll go to the library. Walk around some. The weather is getting better.”

“I would appreciate it if you would keep Alana Bloom apprised of your whereabouts. I think she’d appreciate it as well.” Abigail nods in acknowledgment. Hannibal continues, “Will you be seeing Freddie Lounds?”

“Not planning on it.”

“Good.”

Abigail glances over at him. “You don’t like me talking to her.”

“I never have,” he says, matter of fact. “Nor did Will.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

Hannibal pauses in his cleaning up. “But you’re still set on publishing this book.”

“Yeah.” She lifts her chin. She hasn’t put on a scarf yet; Hannibal suggested that she attempt to get used to not wearing them, to normalize the mark on her neck. “I want to have something that’s mine. The house is gone. The cabin’s gone. Everything we had got sold. All Dad left me was medical bills and a scar.”

“You know you can stay with me as long as you like,” Hannibal says quietly.

“I wanna stand on my own two feet eventually.”

Hannibal looks like he’s considering saying something more, maybe arguing — but finally he just nods. “A laudable goal.”

“You aren’t still worried that I’m going to talk about you in the book, are you?” Abigail turns on the water to rinse off her dishes. “You know I won’t.”

Hannibal shakes his head. “I am quite certain you never will.”

And with that, he leaves.

So Abigail is alone for the weekend.

Friday, she does just what she said she would: goes to the library, checks out some books. Living at Hannibal’s feels a little like living in the 19th century — there’s no TV, and she’s not even certain that he owns a computer. She doesn’t have a computer of her own, either, so while everyone else her age is probably hanging out on Facebook or watching movies online to kill time, she’s just doing what she can on her phone.

The librarian knows her by sight, by now. She’s working her way through a bunch of old favorites, or was, until rereading Nancy Drew reminded her that her mom and dad used to read these to her and they all suddenly felt tainted. All those good, happy times, all those bright memories look dark in the rearview mirror memory. _Objects in the mirror may be less idyllic than they appear._ Was her dad thinking about killing her all that time? When did it start? What was that monster inside him doing all those years before he asked her to help him keep himself from killing her? Was it sleeping? Growing?

When did it come to live inside her, too?

So her childhood favorites eventually got ruled out. But she still wanted something easy to read, something simple with good guys and bad guys who didn’t look like each other. She usually grabs something from the adult shelves, too, usually without really looking, just something big and fat with words that looks serious. It’s mostly camouflage. The librarian recommended some short story collections when Abigail asked about Flannery O’Connor. Sometimes Abigail reads them, sometimes she just lets them sit next to her bed until she returns all the other books.

On Saturday, the weather takes a turn for the unpleasant: freezing cold and rainy, making the sidewalks treacherous and the prospect of walking outside wholly unappealing. Abigail sleeps late, makes lunch, reads. As day wears into evening, though, she starts to get restless. She reads until can’t keep her eyes on the page anymore, then claps her book shut and starts — wandering. Exploring. This is the first time she’s had the house truly to herself.

She starts with the upstairs: her room; the library. She pokes her head into Hannibal’s bedroom suite but feels weird about investigating it too closely. She stands for a few minutes in front of the suit of Japanese armor displayed in the first room of the suite, examining the workmanship, trying to think how on earth Hannibal got his hands on it. And why, more to the point. What’s the significance?

The suite beyond, from what she can see, is beautiful — lots of blue and black and mirrors. It strikes her, not for the first time, just how rich Hannibal must be. Living here for her must be like what moving to the castle was like for Cinderella. This house is the kind of place you live in in your dreams, a set of dollhouse rooms straight out of a high-end (but very weird) magazine. Actually being here, living here, surrounded by all this luxury, feels more than a little unreal.

Then the ground floor: the main hall, with its marbled floor and harpsichord in one corner, seems more like a ballroom than something that belongs in someone’s home. The dining room, with the wall of herbs and the painting of _Leda and the Swan_ in pride of place on one wall. The kitchen.

As Abigail wanders through the kitchen, opening cupboards and cabinets, she notices something she’s never seen before. Along the edge of one panel of flooring, there’s a long, thin rectangle. It doesn’t match the pattern of the floor — it isn’t repeated anywhere else. Curious, Abigail kneels on the floor and examines it more closely.

When she touches it, she feels air moving against her palm.

She jerks her hand back, startled, then holds her hand over the edge of the panel. Definitely air. There’s space underneath this — a basement? Is this a trap door?

She lies down on her stomach and tries to peer through the cracks. It’s pitch black on the other side, of course, and the crack is too small to see through in any case. Air moves against her cheek, soft and cool.

Maybe the rectangle is the catch. She props herself up on her elbows and starts fiddling with the rectangle, running her fingers over the edges. Pressing on it doesn’t work. Whimsically, she tries blowing on it — nothing — then runs her fingernails along its edges.

Her nails find a notch.

Something goes _tock_ behind her.

She lets out half a scream of surprise, whirling around. Nothing behind her. Flashes of every haunted house movie she’s ever seen run through her head. She scrambles to her feet, hurries to the window, afraid of what she might see.

What she sees is — a branch, at the foot of the window. It must have gotten blown against the glass by a gust of wind. Abigail lets out a shaky burst of laughter.

She leaves the panel in the kitchen floor alone for the rest of the night. Goes upstairs to her room to read. Locks the door behind her.

The shadows in her room seem more ominous than usual.

She reads until almost five in the morning, and falls asleep only when it’s starting to get light in the east.

 

* * *

 

“I understand that you want to keep some control over this story . . .”

“I don’t want to be listed as one of Will Graham’s victims, too,” Abigail says. Between her and Freddie is a digital recorder, a notepad, a pot of tea, and a stack of glossy photos. Abigail knows most of them are of the girls her father killed. The ones at the top, though, are of less familiar people: Agent Katz, a woman with long light hair, a man with gray at his temples and a smirk that Abigail doesn’t like much.

Freddie raises her eyebrows and points out, with careful neutrality, “You _aren’t_ one of Will Graham’s victims.”

“But if we make this chapter all about how he took me to Minnesota and went crazy, it’s almost like I am.” The look on Freddie’s face says she isn’t buying this. Abigail tries to put as much self-assurance into her tone as she can. “If you want to write a book about all the people Will Graham killed, fine. But that isn’t my book. Okay?”

“Okay,” Freddie says, with a slow nod. She picks up the photos and straightens them, unnecessarily, tapping them against the table and fingering the corners. “Why the change of heart?”

Abigail shrugs. Even to her, the gesture feels defensive. “I’ve been thinking about — consequences.”

“Consequences,” Freddie echoes.

“I don’t want everyone to think of me as a victim for the rest of my life. My father’s, Will Graham’s . . .” She sits back in her chair and folds her arms. “I’m glad you can’t call it _The Last Victim_.”

“Technically if we subtitled it we could get away with it,” Freddie murmurs. She lays the photos on the table, face down, and folds her hands on top of them, every gesture precise. “But okay. Do you have other ideas for a title?”

Something in her tone or bearing suggests to Abigail that she’s annoyed, and that Abigail had better do something fast to make it up to her if she’s going to keep Freddie Lounds in her corner. And she _wants_ Freddie in her corner. Will and Hannibal are uncertain allies, to say the least.

“I like your ideas,” she offers. “Just — not that one. I don’t know. I was thinking about — something about lacunas.”

Freddie tilts her head. “Lacunas?”

“They’re like — gaps. In language. It comes from the same word ‘lake’ comes from. And I thought, you know, Minnesota, lakes . . .”

After a moment, Freddie smiles slightly. Olive branch accepted. “I think the ‘Land of A Thousand Lakes’ thing might be a little played out,” she says gently.

“A little bit hokey?” Abigail asks, rueful.

“Well, I don’t want to write off hokey.” Freddie’s smile widens. “You’d be amazed how well terrible puns sell to some people. But I think that’s more a headline, not a hardcover. Lacuna. Hmm.” She tilts her head to one side. “Isn’t that a term they use for amnesia, too? When there’s a gap in what you can remember?”

“Is it?” Abigail asks.

“Maybe Hannibal Lecter can fill you in,” Freddie muses. “He’s a psychiatrist, after all.”

“Yeah,” Abigail says, and picks up her cup of tea to disguise her discomfort. “He is. Maybe I’ll ask him.”

“You do that,” Freddie murmurs. A silence; it stretches just into the edge of discomfort before Freddie smiles again. “If you want to lean into the Minnesota angle, maybe _The Shrike’s Nest_. What do you think?”

Abigail thinks it sounds like a graveyard.

“It sounds great,” she says.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See end of chapter notes for content warnings.

_“What do you fear, lady?”_  
_“A cage.”_

-J. R. R. Tolkien, _The Return of the King_

 

* * *

 

Hannibal comes back Sunday night. Abigail spends the whole night wondering if he can tell that she was investigating the panel in the floor of the kitchen. In the morning, when they’re both in the kitchen, she does her best to forget that it’s there and walk over it as if it’s any other part of the floor.

The week goes by. Abigail and Hannibal discuss college (Abigail’s not sure she wants to go at the moment), jobs (Hannibal doubts she’ll be able to find anyone who’ll hire her), and books.

On Friday, Hannibal goes to Delaware again.

As soon as he leaves for work in the morning, Abigail goes to the kitchen.

Finding the notch in the rectangle on the edge of the panel is easier the second time around. It’s harder to get her nails into it than she expected, but after a few tries she manages. When she pull, the rectangle pops up with a click.

It’s a handle.

Abigail sits there on the kitchen floor, staring at it, for a long time. A good five minutes at least. Her mind is whirling.

Hannibal has a secret trap-door in his kitchen floor. This door must lead to an equally secret basement. And then — what? What does he keep down there?

What does a murderer keep in a secret room?

And does she really want to know?

When she finally reaches out to the handle, to put it back where she found it, she surprises herself a little by slapping it back down with force. She feels shaky. Here she is again, keeping a serial killer’s secrets. And that’s the problem, isn’t it. The more she knows, the more secrets she has to keep.

Unless, eventually, she knows enough secrets that she can tell them all. Even her own. If she gave the FBI Hannibal Lecter, the man who really killed all those people — even one of their own agents — would she be able to cut a deal to save herself?

Right now, she doesn’t want to know. She wants to keep this as an ace in the hole. And — if she’s honest with herself — she’s scared. She doesn’t want to go down into the basement by herself. There could be . . . well, there could be monsters.

On Sunday, Hannibal is supposed to come home.

On Saturday, Hannibal calls.

“Something has come up,” he tells Abigail. His voice sounds different than she’s heard it before, but she can’t quite place what the tone is. Annoyance, well-buried, maybe? “I’ll have to stay until at least Monday.”

“Is everything okay?”

A pause on the other end of the phone. Abigail says, “Hannibal?”

“More or less,” he says. “I had a slight accident. But it’s nothing to worry about. I ought to be back on Monday. I’ll call you if I have to extend my stay any further.”

On Monday, Hannibal comes home with a splint on his arm.

“Oh my god!” Abigail leaps up from her chair when Hannibal comes into the room, cradling his left arm against his body. “What happened?”

“An accident,” Hannibal says with a rueful smile. “It’s just a nightstick fracture. It should be fine in a few weeks.”

“God,” Abigail breathes. “Does it hurt?”

He nods. “A little. But I should count myself lucky that it was my left arm.”

“It’s gonna make cooking hard.”

“I hope I can rely on you to sous chef,” he says with a smile. It does look a little strained around the edges, though, and soon he goes to bed.

On Tuesday, Hannibal tells her that he’s planning a dinner party.

 

* * *

 

Escape attempt one.

Beverly strongly suspects that Hannibal has some kind of surveillance in her rooms. If she were keeping a woman captive, that’s what she’d do. Plus, at this point she’s certain that Hannibal doesn’t spend most of his time here, so he must have some way to monitor whoever he keeps here.

(Her brain shies away from the word _prisoner_ , for some reason. Sounds a little too close to _victim_ for her tastes.)

She still isn’t sure how far they are from Baltimore, which worries her. They must be quite a ways, though. The terrain, what she can see of it, doesn’t remind her of anywhere near the city. It’s rugged and remote, which could mean they’re somewhere farther north of DC. But then, it could be one of the islands in Chesapeake Bay. She has no idea.

There’s no way to know, and no good way to find out until she gets out of the house. So she makes her plan as simple and flexible as possible: get out of the house, with as much water as she can carry and some food, and walk inland until she finds a road. Take it from there. Hannibal seems to spend the week away, and then come to house on weekends to resupply her. To give herself the most time, she plans to try and get out the day after he leaves.

Next is how to get out. Although she’s not certain of the house’s layout, she’s pretty sure the second floor isn’t so far off the ground that jumping out of a window would be prohibitively dangerous. So all she has to do is break a window. Shouldn’t be too hard. The window in the bathroom is too high and small to squeeze through, and the one in her bedroom is made of small panes of blacked-out glass that will be hard to break effectively. That leaves the windows in the study, which are tall sheets. The study has the desk chair, too, which should serve as a bludgeon.

This week, Hannibal comes while she’s asleep, which throws her off her rhythm slightly. She knows he’s been here: last “night” before she went to sleep, the fridge in the study had been looking empty, and when she wakes up, she finds it full of food.

Fine. He’s been and gone. Maybe it was daytime when she went to sleep and he had a date for dinner back in Baltimore or something. Her internal clock is well and truly fucked, after all, so she’d never know the difference. She had planned to talk to him before she left, convince him that she was settling into a routine here, bored and depressed but compliant. This saves her the trouble of trying to act for him.

She pulls a pillowcase off of her bed for a bag, then goes about emptying some of the Tupperware in the fridge to fill them with water instead. With her supplies set, she goes to the study and examines the windows and chair one last time.

“Okay, Bev,” she murmurs. She hefts the chair up into both hands, takes a deep breath, and swings for the window.

The chair connects with an immense, juddering _WHACK_. She staggers backwards, her hands stinging. No damage to the window — only a scratch in the blackout material.

The fact that there’s no crack, no nothing, starts a thread of fear in her stomach. She pushes it down, takes a deep breath, and swings again, harder. _WHACK_.

She grunts in pain, staggering backwards. Still nothing. “ _Fuck_ you,” she spits at the window. Swings again. This time something cracks, but not the window: one leg of the chair splinters and snaps off. Beverly curses again, swings again, with less and less power and more and more panic in her blows. More scratches appear in the blackout material, letting through a little dusky light. The fact that that’s all the damage she can do is infuriating. Another leg breaks off the chair.

Finally her hands and shoulders hurt too much to keep hurling what’s left of the chair. She drops it; her breath is coming harsh and hard.

Behind her, the latch of the door clicks.

Beverly whirls, grabbing up one of the chair legs from the floor and brandishing it in front of her. Hannibal pushes the door open slowly, carefully. She sees, with the incredible slow clarity of adrenaline, the way his eyes flick over the damage. The way his lips part a little when he inhales.

“Are you d—”

_Done_ , probably. Before he can get the word out she charges forward and swings for his head.

If she hadn’t spent the last fifteen minutes flailing uselessly at the window — and the last month in near solitary confinement — it might have been a good blow. Hannibal gets an arm up to deflect the chair leg, but with a little more power maybe she would have been able to break a bone.

She doesn’t break anything. She does see him wince hard in pain when her makeshift club slams against his forearm. His lips pull back in a silent snarl — he grabs for the chair leg. Beverly throws herself forward, trying to tackle him to the ground. Hannibal gets a foot braced, though, and grabs her by one wrist. He pulls her closer to try to get his other arm around her neck. Beverly twists and bites his hand as hard as she can before he can manage it. Blood fills her mouth. Hannibal jerks back, but doesn’t let go of her wrist.

For a few breathless seconds, they grapple. Then Hannibal gets Beverly turned around, her back against his chest, and fastens his hand around her throat. Beverly struggles. He squeezes.

A fleeting thought: _Keep fighting. Make him squeeze. Get it over with now._

But—

Instead she goes still. Her breath whistles in her throat as her chest heaves for air.

“Are you done?” Hannibal says in her ear, his voice low and ragged.

She nods, as best she can. He doesn’t let her go. Slowly, with an effort, she relaxes. Goes as limp as she can without putting more pressure on her throat.

That sign of surrender satisfies him. He pulls the chair leg from her hand, tosses it into the study, and tows her the rest of the way into the hall. He kicks the door shut before letting her go.

Beverly stumbles away from him and leans against the wall, desperate to catch her breath. When she looks up at him through her watering eyes, it gives her a bitter twist of pleasure to see him cradling his hurt left arm against his body, just as breathless and disheveled as she is.

Her mouth still tastes faintly of blood, though now she’s not sure if it’s his or hers. She spits onto the pristine ivory carpet.

“What did that accomplish?” Hannibal asks her.

“Fuck you,” Beverly rasps. “I hope I fucking fractured it.”

Hannibal straightens and grabs her by the back of the shirt. She tries to pull away, make a dash for the door to the stairs. Her shirt tears a little, but his grip doesn’t break. He manages to get a hand on one of her wrists and twists her arm up behind her back. She hisses in pain. “ _Shit!_ ”

He drags her this way down the hall to her room. He’s almost gentle, in the last moment, when he propels her through the door and lets go of her arm. Beverly could swear she feels him smooth her shirt on her shoulders.

The last thing she hears him say is “Rude, Beverly. Very rude,” before the door locks behind her.

 

* * *

 

He leaves her in there for, as far as she can tell, a little more than two days.

Two days. Two days. Forty-eight hours. Sixty times forty-eight is . . . is . . .

Beverly’s feeling shaky, and a little dizzy from hunger. She has managed to stay hydrated, at least, and she had a couple of protein bars squirreled away under her mattress. That’s not really enough. How long can you survive with no food? Two days. What if he never comes back?

Beverly wonders if this is how she’s going to die, finally. Starved to death in a luxurious room in a seaside house. At least she’ll hear the water.

She doesn’t sleep very much. The dull ache of fear and sharp cramps of hunger start to feel alike.

She’s curled on her side on the bed, resting, when Hannibal opens the door. Her back is towards him. He can’t see her wince at the sound of the latch.

“Hello, Beverly.” A pause. “You needn’t pretend to be asleep. I thought you might like something eat.”

The smell of cooked meat reaches her at about the same time as the words _something to eat_. Her mouth starts to water instantly. She levers herself up to a sitting position and looks over her shoulder at him.

“Steak?”

“I trust mid-rare is acceptable.”

She nods, dumbfounded. Hannibal comes into the room and sits down on the edge of the bed. Beverly edges away. He ignores the motion, setting the plate down on top of the covers: a grilled cut of meat, sliced thin, red in the center, with mashed potatoes and asparagus.

The next thing that catches her eye is the fork and knife he sets down next to the plate. Beverly looks from those up to his face. She finds him watching her.

“You’re giving me a knife,” she says, blank. She’s almost too dizzy to be suspicious.

“It’s only civilized.”

“What if I attack you again?”

“If you succeeded in killing me, you’d never get out of this house.”

She stares at him, but his expression is inscrutable. “I think you’re lying.”

He cocks his head and nods at the food. “Eat.”

Finally, she picks up the knife and fork and begins to saw at the steak. Hannibal watches her put the first bite in her mouth. His regard is, to say the least, uncomfortable. She drops her eyes to the plate and keeps them there.

After she finishes the first bite of steak, Hannibal leaves her alone with her food for a few minutes. She sees him go down the hallway and disappear into the study. When he comes back, she’s almost cleaned the plate.

“Beverly.”

She looks up from her meal. His eyebrows draw down, slightly. He says, “I’ve been saying your name.”

Beverly blinks at him. “You — what? I didn’t hear you.”

“You didn’t appear to, no. I said it several times.”

Unsure what to say to that, and a little unnerved, she looks down again. “The meat tastes kind of weird,” she mutters when he comes to stand in the doorway. She points at what she’s left on the plate with her fork. “Is that beef?”

“Chuck,” Hannibal says. “A particularly hard-headed bull.”

Something about the way he says it makes her uneasy — but everything right now is making her uneasy. The whole situation is off-kilter, off-center. Out of focus.

Maybe it’s just her.

“I think we should talk,” Hannibal says. He comes into the room and takes her plate, fastidiously aligning the knife and fork on it next to the abandoned meat. “I think therapy will be beneficial to your continued stay here.”

“ _Therapy?_ ” Beverly can’t believe her ears. Literally — she’s sure she misheard him, somehow. “With _you?_ ”

“You don’t have any other options.”

“I don’t want to have therapy with you.” Suddenly tears are stinging her eyes. She closes her eyes, willing them away. “Jesus, you’re the reason I _need_ therapy. You want me to feel better? Let me go. Let me _go_. I won’t tell anyone what happened, if you want. I won’t tell anyone you’re the Copycat. Just let me go.”

“If I could trust that you would keep that bargain,” Hannibal says, almost gently, “perhaps.”

“I don’t want to talk to you.”

“I’ll let you have the run of the house.”

Her head jerks up. “What?”

“If you agree to therapy. And are cooperative within the sessions, of course. If you can show you can be trusted, I’ll let you have more access to the house.”

Beverly looks at him hard, disbelieving, her mouth working. There has to be a catch, a trick, something she’s missing. Access to the house is a ridiculous privilege to grant her. There are knives, glassware, pans — somewhere in the house there might be a phone, or at least a radio. Pencils and pens, things she might make weapons or lockpicks out of—

There has to be a catch, right? Did she dream the whole sumptuous ground floor, with its view of the ocean and the sky? Has he escape-proofed the house somehow? Is her prison more of a prison than ever before, or somehow less?

“Beverly.” He sounds concerned.

“What?”

“You were gathering wool again,” he says. “I’ve been saying your name.”

“—You haven’t,” Beverly objects, taken aback. “I’ve been looking at your face.”

“Several times.” He frowns again. “Consider it, at least. In the meantime, I’ll let you have access to the study again.”

“. . . Okay,” Beverly says. Off-center. Off-kilter. What’s going on, here?

Hannibal nods and turns to go. As he turns, Beverly notices for the first time the stiff way he’s holding his left arm, tucked close to his side.

Something like relief — at the very least, pleasure — wells up in her chest. She _did_ hurt him. Hurt him in a way he can’t ignore or shake off.

It’s the first good feeling she’s had in a long time, and she holds it cupped close to her chest like a match in the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Hannibal versus Beverly violence.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See end notes for content warnings.

_Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over._  
_Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard._  
_And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads._

-”The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman

 

* * *

 

“I’ve thought about seducing you,” Beverly says, meditatively. “Trying to seduce you.”

They are sitting in the living room on the first floor of the house, Hannibal in one chair, Beverly opposite him. It is night. The lights in most of the house are dim; the lamps are turned on around Beverly and Hannibal, putting them in a globe of light all their own.

Hannibal raises his eyebrows. “You’ve thought about sex with me.”

Beverly sighs. “No. I never really get that far in my head. I’ve just thought about the part that leads up to that.”

“Do you desire me sexually?” He sounds, at best, mildly interested. Eminently professional.

She shakes her head _no_. “It’d be a useful way to get close to you. But I don’t think either of us would actually enjoy it.” She adds, very dry, “Too much baggage.”

“It isn’t uncommon for captives to bond with their captors. Even to feel feelings of love, or lust.”

“Stockholm syndrome,” Beverly says. Hannibal inclines his head in agreement. “Can that still happen if you’re aware of the potential for it?”

“Awareness does not change our instincts, though it may change how we act on them. Survival instincts are some of the most persistent, most difficult to act against.”

“Flee, fight, feed, fuck.”

“Indeed. Those drives are closely entwined. ”

Beverly glances at his injured arm. The splint doesn’t show much under his jacket sleeve, but a bit peeks out at the cuff. “I exhausted those first two options. You already feed me. Do you want to fuck me?”

Hannibal looks at her steadily, then says, “No.”

“Are you telling the truth?”

“Whether or not I find you attractive, acting on attraction with you would be deeply unethical.”

Beverly’s eyebrows arch. “ _That’s_  where you draw the line? The ethical line?” She slices her hand through the air, drawing an imaginary line in the sand. “Murder, kidnapping, and mutilation on this side of the line, and—” She waves a hand on the other side. “Sex with, what, your hostage, your patient, over the line. That’s a bridge too far.”

“That surprises you.”

“ _Yes_ ,” she says, with a disbelieving laugh. “Yes, it does. Your odds of meeting someone who committed assault are way higher than meeting someone” — she jerks her chin towards Hannibal — “who killed at least four people.”

“Were you ever assaulted, Beverly?”

She shakes her head again. “No. But people I know have been.”

“Does the possibility of assault frighten you?”

“I . . . don’t know. I guess it did in the past. I guess it still does. But the worst thing that could happen to me has happened to me.” She reaches up and touches the tender scar tissue on the left side of her head, hidden under her hair. “And I’m dead.”

”So sexual assault holds no fear for you any longer. What does?”

Beverly snorts. “I’m not going to tell you that.”

“I’m not interested in frightening you.”

“No?” She studies him. “No. I guess you’re not. That’s not what gets you off, other people’s fear. What is?” He doesn’t reply, so she continues. “I think it’s probably control. That’s why a lot of psychopaths go into professions like yours. Medicine. Surgery. You were a surgeon, right?”

“That’s right,” Hannibal murmurs.

“It made you feel powerful, right? Having the power of life and death over people. Like you have over me now.”

“An astute bit of psychoanalysis, Beverly.”

“Pretty basic.” She rubs a hand over her face. She feels restless, all of a sudden, like her arms and legs are buzzing inside her bones. “Do you mind if I walk around?”

Hannibal spreads his hands, nodding. “Please. Whatever you need to feel comfortable.”

Beverly stands up and paces around the living room, around the boundaries of the conversation area. She can see into the darkness beyond the lit area, easily enough. She can see there’s nothing waiting there. Somehow she feels unwilling to move beyond the confines of this space, though. She could run for the door — and then what? Get into another knock-down, drag-out fight with Hannibal Lecter?

It’s probably locked, anyway. Just like every other door in this godforsaken house.

“What are you thinking about?” Hannibal asks. His voice is soft. Non-judgmental.

“Cages,” Beverly says, distractedly.

“Tell me about that. What does the word conjure up in your mind?”

“Cages? Bars.” She stops pacing, closes her eyes tightly and presses the heels of her hands against them. “Birds. Prison.” She opens her eyes and blinks as green-purple-white splotches cloud her vision. Hannibal is invisible behind them for a moment.

”What’s Jack doing?” she asks, all of a sudden.

“Jack Crawford?”

“Do we know another Jack?” She focuses on Hannibal again and comes back to her chair across from him. “Is he investigating what happened to me?”

Hannibal — actually looks uncomfortable. Or at least, Beverly is pretty sure that’s what discomfort would look like on Hannibal Lecter’s face. “Is he?” she repeats.

“I . . . am hesitant to give you too much information about the FBI,” Hannibal admits. “That is another life. You’ve said so yourself. Fixating on it will only make your time here harder to tolerate.”

“You keep me in a fucking attic,” Beverly says. She’s trying very hard to keep her tone neutral, or something close to it. “Do you think having hope will make it harder to tolerate?”

Hannibal continues to hesitate. Beverly bites her lips, swallows her pride, and says, “Please.”

“The FBI did launch an investigation,” Hannibal admits, finally. “They arrested Will Graham.”

“. . . Come again?” Beverly blinks hard. “Will? They arrested Will? They arrested Will for killing me?”

Hannibal nods. Beverly’s jaw drops as the weight of the news settles into her, descends like night falling on mountains.

“You framed him.” She sits back in her chair heavily. Her chest feels tight, like she can’t get enough air. “You framed _Will?_ ”

Hannibal makes no response.

“You son of a bitch,” she says. It comes out almost like a sigh, almost no force behind it, just numb shock and wonder. “You — he’s your _friend_.”

“He is,” and the regret and sincerity in Hannibal’s voice makes Beverly feel like punching him in the face again.

She rises in one abrupt movement and leaves the living room, heading back to the stairs. Back to her prison upstairs. She’d rather be there than in the same room as Hannibal Lecter.

 

* * *

 

During one visit, Hannibal comes up to Beverly’s room and examines the material blacking out the windows. Beverly sits on her bed while he does this, her legs criss-crossed, and watches.

“Would you like to move to another room?” Hannibal asks, turning away from the window.

Beverly blinks at him. “What do you mean?”

“One with more light.”

She stares. “You mean one with any light? Because I don’t know if you noticed, but there is no light in here.”

When she says smart-ass things like that, Hannibal gets this indulgent look on his face, like an older sibling dealing with a much younger one. It always makes her feel a little embarrassed — like she’s being petty, or childish, or something.

“Why don’t you move to one of the other rooms, then?” he suggests.

“They’re locked.”

“And I have the key.” He digs in one pocket and produces a small ring with four or five keys on it. “Come. You can pick out the one you prefer.”

Beverly stares after him as he moves for the door, perplexed, then scrambles off the bed when she realizes that he means it. She follows him down the hallway to the door past the study.

When he opens it, light streams into the hallway — golden, early morning light, shot through with jeweled colors, blues and reds and greens. For a moment it hurts Beverly’s eyes. When her vision adjusts, she peers into the room.

In contrast to the room she’s been living in, it seems impossibly bright and airy. The walls and furnishings are a pale off-white. The tall windows look out onto the water. A large stained glass piece, an icon of some saint or other, hangs in the center panel, casting those kaleidoscopic colors over the bed and the floor. The overall effect is like being inside a jewelry box, Beverly thinks, one with the lid open to expose the facets of all the gems inside.

“Holy shit,” she murmurs. “This is beautiful.”

“You like it?”

She nods, stepping into the room. She runs her fingers along the wall; this is a habit she’s picked up without even noticing, a way of reminding herself which way is up. “Who’s the saint?”

“St. Denis, the Bishop of Paris.” Hannibal stands in the door frame, watching her move around the room with obvious pleasure on his face. “It’s a custom piece.”

“You’re not Catholic.” It’s not a question, just a statement. ”Why do you have a French saint in your guest bedroom?”

“Denis was an interesting figure.” He comes into the room and lifts a hand to indicate the stained glass, pointing out details as he speaks. “Denis is the French form of Dionysius, and as such he is frequently confused with Saint Dionysius the Aeropagite.”

“Gesundheit.”

“But whereas Dionysisus the Aeropagite was a judge, Denis was an evangelist. His efforts at converting the pagans were so effective that he incited the wrath of the local leaders. They beheaded him, and he picked up his head and walked ten kilometers, still preaching.”

“Wow.” Beverly raises her eyebrows. “Talk about dedication. You’re not trying to give me a hint to convert by putting me in here, are you?”

“Absolutely not,” Hannibal says, mildly affronted. “That would be terribly rude. If you prefer, you are more than welcome to the other room. Or I can remove the icon.”

Beverly shakes her head and comes to stand next to him, examining the stained glass. “No, it’s okay. What’s he the patron saint of? They’re all saints of something, right? Like, specialists?”

“Indeed. Saint Denis’ patronage includes the city of Paris. He’s prayed to as proof against frenzy, strife, and possession.” Hannibal glances sideways at Beverly and adds, with a conspiratorial smirk, “And headaches.”

Beverly snorts. “Christianity is really weird.”

“I cannot say you’re wrong.” Something seems to catch his eye, and he turns towards her. Before she can react, he reaches up and pulls the curtain of her hair back from the scar on the left side of her head.

Beverly freezes up as his fingers touch her hair. Hannibal is very gentle and very professional. His surgeon’s hands are simply touching her — her—

Nobody has touched her in a long time. Unless you count the time she tried to escape and Hannibal choked her out. That seems like a long time ago, too.

While she’s trying to figure out what to do, how to react, what to say, Hannibal examines the scar tissue with a critical eye. “How is your hearing out of this side?” he asks.

“Not — great,” Beverly says. “Not like it was.”

Then he moves his hand away. Beverly opens her eyes; she didn’t realize she’d closed them.

“My apologies,” Hannibal says, softly.

“—For what?” Beverly says, suddenly angry. “For half deafening me?”

“I thought it would be a better option than your fingers, or a whole hand,” Hannibal replies. He seems unperturbed by her rapid mood shift. “But I still regret that it was necessary.”

Beverly swallows and then turns away from him sharply. St. Denis’ sad and serene severed head seems like a mockery of her own emotional lability. “You’re so full of shit,” she mutters. “God, you don’t — you say stuff like that and you sound like you believe it.”

A light touch on her shoulder makes her jerk. Whirling, she knocks his hand away. “Don’t you _dare_  touch me, asshole.”

“Beverly — I am sorry.” His voice is still the low, soothing tone of someone trying to calm a vicious animal. Or a tantruming child. “If things could have gone another way, I would have liked them to have done so.”

“Like what? Like me never seeing your pattern? Where would we be then? Getting buddy-buddy in the BAU?” She rakes a hand through her hair, winces, turns away again. Strands of hair are caught between her fingers. It’s been thinning for a while. “Or would I really be dead instead of just fake dead? Or something else? What possible other outcome do you see that would have been preferable to this?”

“In another world, Beverly, I would wish that you had never found me out, yes.”

”Sorry to disappoint. Maybe you shouldn’t have killed so many people.”

Hannibal doesn’t respond to that one. Beverly doubts it’s out of shame or anything else so noble. She goes to the window and presses her hands against the cold, clear glass, looking out onto the water. The waves crash, and crash, and crash again.

“I’ll be downstairs,” Hannibal finally murmurs. “I’ll cook you something.”

“Don’t trouble yourself,” Beverly says bitterly. She hears him breathing a few yards behind her for another few moments — then the rustle of clothes and his nearly silent footsteps as he leaves.

When she’s sure she’s alone, she balls up one fist and slams the side of it against the glass. Her hand hurts. The glass doesn’t notice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Discussion of sex and sexual assault. Possibly some dubconny Hannibal/Beverly tension.


	12. Chapter 12

* * *

 

Will              Abigail              Beverly

  
isn’t sure what day it is.


	13. Chapter 13

_and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat  
                                                                                              Jesus _

-E. E. Cummings

* * *

 

“How are you liking living with Hannibal?”

Coffee and a walk with Alana Bloom. Abigail shifts her grip on her coffee cup and shrugs. “It’s — weird. It’s better than being at the hospital.” She winces slightly. “Sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Alana assures her.

“I thought you really wanted me to stay there.”

“Well . . .” Now Alana shrugs. “I thought, when you first woke up and were readjusting, that a structured environment was the best place for you. I still think it was initially.”

“I really hated it there.”

Alana nods, not offended. “Normally for someone in your situation, I’d recommend you live with family. Someone who can help maintain that support structure for you. But all things considered — I think Hannibal is your best bet.”

Neither of them say _he’s the closest thing you have to family_ , but Abigail feels it hang in the air between them for a moment, then settle. Situation understood. Moving on.

“Do you have everything you need there? Everything you want?”

“I sort of wish I had a computer.” Abigail looks up quickly. “I mean — I don’t expect one or anything, please don’t think I’m asking you for one.”

Alana laughs. “Don’t worry! I don’t. But have you talked to Hannibal about it?”

Abigail shakes her head. “He’s — doing so much for me already. I feel weird asking him for more.”

“Why?” The tone makes it a therapist’s question, not a conversational one.

“I’m nineteen years old. I’m old enough to live on my own. I know that I, that I can’t right now, for lots of reasons, but I don’t want to be — dependent.”

“Like you were at home?”

Abigail wants to flinch, but she thinks she hides it. “I guess.”

“Wanting to exert some kind of control over your environment is a completely natural response to everything you’ve been through. You’ve had control taken away from you a lot. You want to take it back.”

“Yeah.”

Alana looks down at her coffee cup, takes a sip, and says carefully, “Speaking of control — Hannibal wants me to talk to you about your book.”

Abigail feels a surge of anger well up in her chest. “Him and everyone else,” she mutters. “Are you going to tell me not to write it?”

“Absolutely not.”

That surprises Abigail; she looks sidelong at Alana, not entirely certain she believes her. But Alana’s expression is open and serious. She continues, “But I am going to tell you to be careful with who you trust your story to. Freddie Lounds . . . wouldn’t be my first choice.”

“Because she’s a trashy writer?”

Alana raises her eyebrows and pulls the corners of her mouth down, a _you said it, not me_ expression. “Not exactly the words I would’ve used. She’s in this because she thinks she can make a profit off of your story.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Maybe you would be better off working with someone who values you and your story as something more than a royalty check.”

“Freddie Lounds has been straight with me since I woke up,” Abigail says, rather sharp. “Most of the people around me have been trying to make my story into what they think it should be. ‘Oh, she’s a poor little girl,’” she imitates, “‘oh, she’s a murderer—’”

Her voice wavers; she breaks off and stares hard at the ground, willing herself not to cry. Alana’s mouth has turned into a hard, thin, angry line. When Alana speaks, though, her voice is low and gentle.

“The people who’ve accused you of crimes are people who are looking for fast solutions to difficult problems. They’re reactionary, not rational.”

“Even your boss?”

“Jack Crawford is definitely not my boss. And yes. Even him.” Alana’s gaze drops from Abigail’s face. “He’s far from perfect.”

That sounds like there’s a story behind it. Abigail thinks distractedly that maybe she’ll ask Hannibal about it. She shakes her head hard, to clear it, and goes back to her original point. “Freddie Lounds hasn’t tried to tell me what my story should be. So even if she just sees me as a paycheck — at least she sees me as a paycheck that knows how to think for herself.”

Alana watches her for a moment or three. Abigail can practically see the wheels turning in her head, and her expression softening.

“Okay,” Alana says finally, quietly. “Be careful. That’s all I’ll ask.”

Abigail nods, looking away. How can you say I’m more careful than you can possibly know; I have to be, living with a murderer? Is there even a good half-truth to convey that?

There’s really not. So she just murmurs, “Okay. I will.”

Just be careful. Cover your tracks, stay upwind, and breathe out when you pull the trigger.

Easy.

* * *

 

“I miss being touched.”

Hannibal in his chair; Beverly in hers. It is night. Outside in the dark, waves are crashing on the rocks, and inside, Beverly isn’t having the greatest session. Hannibal is relaxed and leaning back in his chair, one ankle resting on the opposite knee; Beverly has her arms wrapped around herself in a tight, unhappy knot. The first floor of the house never seems to get warm at night. There’s always a faint sepulchral chill.

“I haven’t — I mean, I haven’t been touched by anybody in — how long have I been here, even?” No answer from Hannibal. “I don’t know. I don’t know when the days start and end anymore. I just go to sleep and I wake up and I’m—” The breath she takes is shaky. “God, I’m lonely.”

“Did you have a lover or a partner before you came here?”

The fact that Hannibal refers to it by the astonishingly neutral _came here_ instead of _taken here_ goes right by her. She tries to get her breathing and her voice under control. “Nobody steady. People that — I thought might—”

She breaks off. Hannibal waits for her to continue, and finally prompts, “People you thought might be your lovers?”

“Yeah.”

“Who?”

Beverly opens her mouth and then shuts it. “I don’t think I should tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I think you might hurt them, Hannibal.” She rubs at her eyes. “I’m afraid of that. You’re still hurting people, aren’t you?”

“Killing people,” he corrects, matter-of-fact. “Yes.”

“Wow.” Beverly lets out a shaky laugh. “I wasn’t sure you’d ever just come out and say it like that.”

“You’ve killed people as well.”

“In the line of duty. That’s different.”

“Is it?”

“I never took any pleasure in it.”

“How many people have you killed?”

Beverly is silent for a long, long minute. Hannibal waits it out, patient as a headstone. Finally, Beverly says, “Just one.”

“Tell me about it. A man or a woman?”

“A man. He was holding another agent at gunpoint. It was right after I’d gotten hired at the BAU.”

She closes her eyes, tired, and draws her knees up to her chest. If Hannibal objects to socks on the chairs — well, frankly, she doesn’t give a damn. “He had been killing young men for two months — he picked them up in the red light districts of DC, Baltimore, all the way over to Philadelphia, and took them home, tortured them, burned them, killed them. Jack got very intense about it. We finally found someone who could describe him to a sketch artist, and then we found someone who could identify him when we were going door to door in neighborhoods in Philly. We tracked him down at his kill spot. He had a welding studio.”

She takes a deep breath. Behind her eyelids, she can see it so clearly: the storefront in the strip mall outside the city, the agent that O’Connell had grabbed. “One of the agents went in too fast. The guy shot him in the side and was holding a gun to his head. We were all spread out around the front of the store, and I — I shot him in the head. He died pretty much instantly.”

Hannibal’s voice is like a breeze, like a brush through her hair. “What did you feel, when you shot him?”

“Calm. Then,” she murmurs. She feels calm now, she finds, the heavy calm that comes after crying. “I didn’t feel a lot. I just felt — I don’t know. I remember thinking that I had to make sure to compensate because he was swaying a little — kind of back and forth, you know? — but I remember thinking at least I don’t have to worry about wind in here. And then I pulled the trigger and I saw his head jerk. And that was it.” She rubs her cheek; her eyes are still closed. “I remember thinking as soon as he dropped that I shouldn’t have done that because he could have shot the agent when he was dying. I don’t know, I thought maybe he could have pulled the trigger in his death throes or something. I wasn’t thinking as clearly after he dropped.”

“Did you feel guilt over killing him?”

Beverly opens her eyes. “Of course I did. I had nightmares for months.”

“Why? If he was threatening one of your colleagues, why feel any remorse over killing him?”

“Because he was still a person. I mean, maybe we could have talked to him. Maybe he could have been reasoned with.” She shivers. “I didn’t feel a lot of remorse. It was pretty obvious he was guilty. We found pictures of every one of his victims in his storeroom. That wasn’t a problem. But it bothered me.”

“But he deserved to die.”

Beverly shakes her head, hard. “I don’t think like that. I don’t know if anyone _deserves_ to die.”

“Even me?” Hannibal asks.

“I don’t know,” Beverly says. “Maybe you.”

“Would you feel any remorse over killing me, if it meant your freedom?”

“No.” That comes quickly, easily. “I wouldn’t feel any remorse. But I’d feel regret.”

“Why?”

“Because I think you’ve killed a lot more people than the ones I know about. And I think if you died none of those people would get justice. Only I would.”

“I see.”

She looks at him closely, sitting there across the way from her. She can’t read his expression. “How does that make _you_ feel?” she asks.

Hannibal smiles — and as always, when he smiles, Beverly is a little startled by how genuine it appears.

“Curious.”


	14. Chapter 14

_“Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.”_

\- Raymond Carver, “The Bridle”

* * *

 

The dinner party is one of the weirder things that have happened to Abigail in the last few months.

Alana helped her find a dress, a high-necked sleeveless thing in a dark autumnal orange. The number of guests is staggering. In her old life, “dinner party” meant maybe six, seven guests, seated around the dining room table, with a card table dragged out of the garage to squeeze in the overflow. After the twentieth person arrives at Hannibal’s front door, Abigail gives up on trying to keep count. She sees some of the same faces circling through the main hall and the dining room time after time, and that’s about all she can keep track of. Alana looks beautiful in her blue dress, and Hannibal is a host extraordinaire, working the room.

Both of them made a point of assuring her before the party even started that if she wanted to leave, to avoid the crowd, at any time, she should feel free to go upstairs to her room. Nobody would be going up there; nobody would bother her. For the first half-hour, as guests begin to arrive, Abigail thinks she’s going to be fine and there’ll be no need to retreat.

But then as the house starts to fill up with people — older people, Hannibal’s age, rich and glamorous, shiny with satin and silver and jewelry — she starts to feel intensely anxious. The house, normally so big and empty, feels too small and hot with all these people in it, and the neck of her dress feels too tight, and her heels hurt her feet, and she just — she just—

She just doesn’t want to deal with it. And they said she didn’t have to. So she goes upstairs.

But after an hour in her room trying to read, Abigail changes her mind. Music and chatter from downstairs have been coming through her floor or drifting up to her window from the front walk the whole time, making it difficult to focus. And now there are so many people here, maybe she’ll be able to get lost in the crowd. She doesn’t want to have any conversations, she decides. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to go to the party and try some of the food Hannibal’s been working on the past few days.

She puts her shoes back on and sneaks down the stairs. That’s her first shock: the sheer number of people that have arrived since she left. Servers are moving through the crowd with trays of bite-sized delicacies. One pauses as she passes Abigail to offer her a prosciutto rose, skewered to a cube of watermelon. Abigail accepts with a smile.

As she moves through the crowd looking for a quiet corner, she spots Alana and gives her a smile as well. Alana’s expression lights up when she sees Abigail, but she’s busy conversing with a man in a bow tie. She gives Abigail a tiny wave under the man’s line of sight. Abigail laughs a little, waves back, and turns away.

Another server comes by with a tray of glasses. “Wine, miss?”

Abigail starts to decline — but what the hell, right? It’s a party. She doesn’t want to drink very much, but a little won’t hurt. She takes a glass of white wine, murmuring a thank you, and turns away to keep looking for a place to sit.

And gets the second shock of the evening when she almost runs into Jack Crawford.

“Abigail,” he says pleasantly.

Abigail stares at him. She has no idea what to say. “Hi. —Agent Crawford. Hi.”

“Long time no see.” His gaze flicks to the glass in her hand and back to her face. “Enjoying the party?”

Of course this conversation would happen while she has wine in her hand instead of an hors d'oeuvres. “It’s okay. It’s a little busy for me, I guess.”

“I’m not a big fan of party crowds myself,” Crawford says. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

“I live here.”

“Right, right. Dr. Lecter’s your guardian now, isn’t he?”

“That’s right.”

“Mm.” Crawford smiles. It doesn’t reach his eyes. “How’s that working out for you?”

Abigail’s jaw clenches. “Better than my last guardian. Excuse me.”

She starts to move past him, but he says her name again, halting her. “Do you know where I can find Dr. Lecter?”

“He’s around here somewhere. _Excuse_ me.”

She doesn’t look back to see if he’s watching her, or looking for Hannibal, or what. He can do what the hell he wants, as long as he does it somewhere away from her. Her heart’s pounding in her ears. Why the hell did Hannibal invite him? Abigail is trying to stay _out_ of his notice, not walk right into it.

Everywhere on the first floor seems packed. No seats anywhere. Finally she ends up leaning against the wall near the kitchen, tucked into an alcove. She sips her wine and tries to project inconspicuousness.

Insofar as that’s possible when wearing orange.

Mostly it seems to work; people ignore her, or just give her a polite smile and nod when they notice her. Maybe the party won’t be so bad in the end. Jack Crawford seems to be gone, or at least hasn’t come by again.

Then a short man with a cane catches her eye, and the immediate interest in his eye dashes that hope to the ground.

“You are Abigail Hobbs,” he says when he comes up to her, without any other preamble.

“Yeah?” Abigail raises her eyebrows.

He gives her a smile that’s more of a smirk and sticks out a hand. “Dr. Frederick Chilton. Chief of staff at the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane.”

Abigail shakes his hand, a little reluctantly. “That’s the hospital where Will Graham is.”

“That is correct. You are familiar with it, are you not?”

Her heart seizes up. Hannibal still doesn’t know that she went to visit Will, and she wants to keep it that way. “Only from the news.”

“Only?” Dr. Chilton gives her a narrow look under his eyebrows. “I could have sworn I saw you there a few weeks back.”

Fuck fuck fuck. Why didn’t she cover her tracks better? Probably because she never would have dreamed that Hannibal Lecter would invite the guy from the insane asylum to dinner. She looks over Dr. Chilton’s shoulder, trying to see if Hannibal is in earshot, and spots him across the room, conversing with Alana.

“Dr. Chilton,” she says, pitching her voice low, “I kind of — sneaked out to go visit Will Graham. You know, against doctor’s orders?”

Dr. Chilton’s interest sharpens visibly. Abigail stifles the urge to squirm. What a creep. “Against the wishes of Dr. Lecter?”

“He thought it wouldn’t be beneficial to my therapy, but I . . .” She shrugs. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention it to him.”

“Most teenagers rebel by sneaking out of the house to go drinking.” He purses his lips. “Although I suppose if Hannibal Lecter enables a little underage consumption of alcohol within his own house, one would have to seek out other avenues for adolescent high spirits and pushing of boundaries.”

Abigail stares at him.

“Your secret is safe with me,” Dr. Chilton concludes. He looks very smug about it.

“Thanks,” Abigail says, with a warm gratitude she doesn’t really feel. She’s getting fed up with other people keeping secrets for her. It gives them way too much leverage over her when she has none over them.

“You are quite welcome.” He brushes an invisible and probably imaginary piece of lint off his lapel. “I am glad to have the opportunity to meet you in person, Miss Hobbs. After hearing so much about you in the papers, and considering your involvement with Will Graham’s case, of course, even peripherally. And you present quite the interesting story yourself.”

Any warmth she was feeling, false or otherwise, disappears. “Psychologically speaking?” she says, acidly.

Dr. Chilton waves his free hand in a gesture half of dismissal, half of apology, which is quite the trick. “I assure you, Miss Hobbs, I am not about to psychoanalyze you as a party trick. You have achieved a certain level of fame in your own right, though, and that does invite scrutiny.”

“Fame or infamy?”

“In my experience, the difference is really only one of spelling, not definition.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not how words work,” Abigail says doubtfully.

Dr. Chilton ignores this. “It _is_ rather remarkable that you would visit Will Graham at all, given your past history with him. Tell me, do you think of him as a surrogate father, or is that role reserved for Dr. Lecter at this point?”

She tenses, stiffening her spine. “I thought you weren’t going to psychoanalyze me, Dr. Chilton. I just want to enjoy this party in peace, please.”

“Hmm.” A tight-lipped smile crawls across Dr. Chilton's face. “I see that past history aside, you and Will Graham share certain personality traits. Well.” He inclines his head. “I will leave you to your wine. Should you ever feel the inclination to visit my institution, do feel welcome to stop by my office. I would quite enjoy a chat with you.”

Abigail makes herself smile back. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Dr. Chilton nods to her again and turns to go — then turns back and asks, with abrupt bonhomie, “Did you assist Dr. Lecter with the food?”

“No.” God, is he ever going to leave?

“No,” Dr. Chilton repeats, eying her. “Wouldn’t want to get too many fingers in the finger food, hm.”

“Too many cooks spoil the broth,” Abigail says, dry.

“Is it cooks in there?” Dr. Chilton asks lightly. “Interesting. Well, good evening, Miss Hobbs.”

And with that nonsensical addition, he turns and moves off through the crowd. Abigail notices that when one of the servers offers him a tray of hors d’ouevres, he waves them off a little more emphatically than she would have expected.

 

She has most of the rest of the party to herself, thankfully. Hannibal wanders by at one point, notices her, and winks; in spite of herself and the stress of the evening, she grins back at him. A few minutes after that, Alana finds her.

“Hey.”

Abigail looks guiltily at the glass of wine she’s still holding, and smiles ruefully at her. “Hey.”

Alana leans up against the wall next to her, tucking her hands behind her back. “Having fun?”

For the first time, Abigail feels faintly guilty about the wine. “I, um . . .”

“Don’t worry about it,” Alana says, nodding to the wine. “When I was your age I was making poor life choices involving six-packs of PBR and the city park up the street. I think everyone would’ve been happier if I had been drinking chablis under supervision.”

“Is that what this is?”

“Far as I know.” Alana shrugs. “I’m not much of a wine drinker.”

“You don’t really seem like a cheap beer drinker, either.”

“Well, I’m not anymore.” Alana gives her a sheepish, sideways grin. “Nineteen was a long time ago. Make sure you drink some water, okay?”

“I will,” Abigail promises. “Thanks. Are you having a good time?”

“Oh, sure. Hannibal really knows how to throw a dinner party. It does get” — she heaves a sigh — “ a little overwhelming after a little while, though. How are you holding up?”

Abigail shrugs. “It’s not so bad out of the way. I didn’t know Jack Crawford was going to be here, though.”

Alana gives her a startled look. “Jack Crawford was here?”

“Yeah. Didn’t you see him?”

“No, we must have missed each other.” She presses her lips together, looking out over the crowd. “is he still here?”

“I haven’t seen him. I think maybe he left.”

“Right.” Alana shakes her head. “Abigail, I’m so sorry. If I’d known he was coming I would have warned you. I can’t believe Hannibal didn’t tell me ahead of time, he knows—” She breaks off.

Abigail thinks, resignedly, that she can absolutely believe Hannibal didn’t tell Alana ahead of time. She’s a little mad, though, that Hannibal didn’t tell her. “it’s okay,” is what she says, though. “We didn’t talk long. He pretty much left me alone.”

“Good.”

Abigail cocks her head. “You don’t like him, do you?”

“No, that’s not it. I have a lot of respect for Jack Crawford. Usually he’s very good at his job.”

“Usually.”

“He’s caught a lot of criminals. But he can get a little . . . single-minded. Even when he’s wrong about things.” Suddenly Alana looks down at the floor; her shoulders tense up a little. “Of course, he’s not always wrong.”

“. . . Like about what?” Abigail asks. A thread of tension starts to creep up her own shoulders.

“”Oh—” Alana shakes her head. “It’s nothing I should bother you with. Don’t worry about it, okay?”

“Easy for you to say.”

“If you want, we can talk about it in a day or two,” Alana offers. Abigail frowns at her, but nods. Alana looks grateful. “Thanks, Abigail.”

A minute or two later, Alana is called away to another conversation, leaving Abigail to wonder what on earth is going on with her. And doesn’t that feel backwards.

Abigail finally abandons the party when she finishes her drink. The wine makes her feel sleepy and a little fuzzy, and people-watching just isn’t interesting enough to keep her downstairs any longer. She retreats to her room, kicks off her heels and drops her dress in a corner, and lays back on her bed with a book in hand.

 

She wakes up sometime later with a confused jolt. She doesn’t remember falling asleep. There was a dream, of sorts, something about red and orange leaves falling on her and burying her in a thick pile, but they felt soft, like a quilt, and the weight was almost comforting . . .

For a minute or two she can’t figure out where she is or what time it is, or what’s woken her up. Her blankets feel too hot; she kicks them off and draws her knees up, sleepily feeling cool air on her skin.

There’s some sound she’s not used to. Quiet but piercing. Somewhere inside the house, not on the street. Like someone exercising, or—?

Oh.

_Oh_ , no, Hannibal is hooking up with someone.

And when that someone down the hall says Hannibal’s name, it’s pretty obvious the someone is Alana Bloom.

Abigail gets up very quietly, locks her door, returns to bed, and puts a pillow over her head.

On the plus side, she thinks, as she tries to go back to sleep, at least this is a fairly normal kind of trauma.

On the minus side, doesn’t anyone have any manners?

Eventually, Hannibal and Alana stop doing whatever it is they’re doing. Silence falls over the house again. Abigail gratefully falls back to sleep.

She has another odd dream — one where someone is trying to open her door. A brief dream: the door knob only rattles for a second or two. Then she drifts off into deep sleep again.

 

She is woken some time later by the sound of a knock on the front door downstairs. Early morning light tints the room a pale grey. Abigail lies there for a moment or two, taking stock. Her mouth tastes like old chewing gum; she makes a face up at the ceiling.

Another knock downstairs. She sits up, frowning, and checks the time. Seven in the morning, Sunday. Who on earth . . .?

Distantly, she hears the front door open — muffled voices in the front hall. She rolls out of bed and pulls on her robe, heads for the stairs.

As she comes down the hallway that leads to the foyer, she freezes. One of the voices belongs to Jack Crawford.

“. . . nowhere to be found,” he says.

“He escaped?” Hannibal asks, concerned.

“We know he didn’t walk out of there,” Crawford replies. “His back was broken. Someone took him. Someone he knew.” A pause. Abigail holds her breath. Who are they talking about? Will Graham?

“Where were you last night?” Crawford asks.

Hannibal sounds surprised. “Here.”

“All night.”

“Yes.”

“Anyone besides you that can verify that?”

“Abigail’s room is down the hall from mine.”

Abigail’s eyes widen. He can’t be using her as an alibi. She can’t—

She jumps and takes in a panicked gasp when someone touches her shoulder. Alana, wearing one of Hannibal’s shirts and no pants, gives Abigail’s shoulder a squeeze and moves past her towards the front hall.

“So you just have Abigail Hobbs’ word,” Crawford says. His tone is heavily dubious.

Alana Bloom stops in the entryway to the foyer and announces, “And mine.”

Abigail hesitates, then steps up next to Alana. Jack Crawford is looking at them both with badly concealed surprise.

Abigail kind of knows how he feels.

“I was here with Hannibal all night, Jack,” Alana says, folding her arms, daring Crawford to imagine it. “What are you accusing him of?”

“I’m not accusing him of anything,” says Crawford. “Just asking his whereabouts.”

“That’s not all you were asking,” Hannibal retorts. His voice has a smooth, sharp edge of annoyance in it. Abigail gives him a quick look; his expression is blank, unreadable, and that blankness seems more ominous than anger would.

“I have an obligation to do my due diligence,” Crawford says.

“You’ve done it,” Alana snaps. “Any more questions?”

A muscle twitches in Crawford’s jaw. He shakes his head, puts his hat on. “Not at the moment. Sorry to get you all up.”

“Do keep us informed if you have any further news of Abel Gideon,” Hannibal says, as Crawford turns to go. “Given his record, I believe we would all feel safer if we knew where he stands.”

“I would, too,” Crawford mutters, and leaves.

Hannibal shuts the door behind him and flicks the deadbolt closed with a final, dismissive k-chunk. He stands facing the door for a moment, apparently gathering himself, then turns to Alana and Abigail.

“Well.” He shakes his head. “Since it seems none of us will be able to sleep late this morning — breakfast, anyone?”

 


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See end notes for content warnings.

_I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead._  
_(I think I made you up inside my head.)_

-Sylvia Plath, "Mad Girl's Love Song"

* * *

 

In his dreams, Will stands in the river, the water running fast around his knees, and casts his line. Gold sky, blue water, green banks. If there is a heaven — not that, if he’s honest in himself, he believes in a heaven or any other kind of afterlife — he thinks it must be something like this.

On the bank sits a woman. Sometimes she’s Georgia Madchen, and then, she looks like she did in the old picture her mother showed them as they investigated Beth Lebeau’s death. She smiles and laughs and sometimes wades a little ways into the water. The water on her skin, she tells Will, feels like French horn music.

“What does French horn music feel like?” Will asks, amused, as he knots his fishing line.

“Like this water,” Georgia tells him. She laughs at the tautology. So does Will.

Sometimes, more rarely, she’s Abigail Hobbs, and she stands beside Will in the river and he teaches her to fish. They are so far from shore. So far from anywhere. Their feet are firm in the gravel of the river bed, and nothing can hurt them.

Most often, the woman on the bank is Beverly Katz. She leans back on her hands and calls jokes to him, teasing him about catching fish and tall tales. When he looks over at her, she has the stag’s head in her lap. Its breath is silver in the air, like the mist on the river. Beverly scratches its massive forehead and between its ears. Will has never seen it look content like that.

He tends to find those moments unnerving, like watching someone walk a high-wire with no net. But Beverly doesn’t feel the danger, apparently, and so he lets the beast snuffle and snort next to her and makes no effort to drive it away.

“Harmony’s not so hard,” Beverly tells him in one of those dreams. “But it’s not bloody, either.”

“All I can see is blood,” Will replies. “I taste it on the back of my tongue and the roof of my mouth when I wake up. Like a hangover.”

Beverly looks unimpressed. “You need better drinking buddies.”

* * *

Escape attempt number two.

Hannibal has been giving her more and more freedom of movement, little by little, starting with the new room. Being able to see natural light all day long, if she wants to, is such a luxury that she stops thinking about getting away for a while. Watching sunset, and stars, feels almost like freedom in and of itself.

So when she tries to escape again, it’s more of an impulse. She has no plan, no supplies packed, nothing like that this time.

She’s in the kitchen with Hannibal, helping him cook their dinner. He brought the meat with him this time — something red, maybe veal — and little jars of spices and cartons of cream and stock. The dish is something French that Beverly has never even heard of, and seems to involve a lot of finicky work on the meat. Beverly is serving as sous chef, chopping vegetables according to Hannibal’s instructions. Classical music plays on the stereo, swelling strings, French horns. They don’t converse a great deal; they only really talk during her therapy sessions, these days.

He turns away from her, and in an instant, before she’s even really made the conscious decision, Beverly wraps her hand around the knife’s handle, turns, and sprints for the front door of the house.

Which is locked. Obviously.

“God _fucking dammit!_ ”

She bangs the handle of the knife against the door, frustrated. She barely even feels defeated — just annoyed. Annoyed at the door, annoyed at herself for such a lousy attempt, annoyed that Hannibal just never slips up.

“Beverly?”

She bangs the knife on the door again, which at least leaves a dent in the wood. When she turns, brandishing the knife, she finds Hannibal standing a few feet away, out of arm’s reach. He makes a slightly surreal picture: half-lit by the lights from the kitchen and the outdoor sconces on the patio, with his sleeves rolled up and his apron a white square in the dimness.

“Well?” he says.

“I could kill you,” Beverly points out. There’s very little heat behind the words. She’s so _sad_. So tired.

“Would it make you feel better?”

“Maybe." She watches him closely, but the tip of the knife is tracing uncertain figure eights in the air. If she could see herself, see the stubborn light in her eyes set against the dullness of her skin, she might not wonder that he keeps his distance. "I don’t know," she adds, with complete honesty. "Wanna try?”

“If you kill me,” Hannibal says, “you won’t be able to get out of the house.”

She stares at him, swallows hard.

“Put down the knife,” Hannibal suggests.

Slowly, slowly, she lowers her arm. Drops the knife. It clatters on the hardwood floor, dangerously close to her bare feet.

Hannibal comes forward quickly and grabs her by both wrists, a firm but not painful grip, and pulls her away from the knife. She doesn’t resist. They come to a stop in the center of the living room. He examines Beverly’s face and expression; Beverly stares past him towards the ocean-side windows, feeling empty.

Hannibal slaps her.

It doesn’t hurt very much, but it does startle her enough to snap her focus to him. He’s transferred her wrists to one hand, and she struggles to break free of his grip, twisting her wrists towards his thumb. He lets her go and she takes a step backwards, rubbing her cheek.

“For someone so concerned with manners, you’re sure cavalier about hitting a woman,” she snarls.

“For a guest in my home, you have been remarkably impolite,” Hannibal replies coolly. “I’ve eaten people for less.”

“Oh, please.”

“Now, can I trust you with a knife to continue prepping, or will we have to delay our dinner?”

“God, were you always this condescending?”

“Behave like an adult and I won’t have to treat you like a child,” Hannibal says. “Can I trust you with a knife or not?”

“I’m not—” She breaks off, her mouth twisted into a frown, and shakes her head. “I won’t go for the knife.”

Surprisingly, that seems to satisfy him. Hannibal steps aside and gestures for her to precede him to the kitchen. She does — but she doesn’t pick up another knife. She moves past the kitchen island, where her prep station sits abandoned, and into the sitting room by the patio windows. There she sits heavily on an ottoman, close enough to the window to feel the chill off the glass. The song that’s been playing on the stereo all this time comes to a gentle end; after a breath or two, the next song starts.

She doesn’t look away from the window when Hannibal draws another ottoman up next to her and sits down. She does glance over towards him when he holds out a glass of red wine in her direction.

“I must apologize,” Hannibal says.

Beverly eyes him, then accepts the wine and takes a sip. The taste is heavy on her tongue, almost metallic under the flavors of fruit and the soft tang of alcohol.

“You apologize a lot for a serial killer,” Beverly mutters.

“Rudeness is unspeakably ugly to me.” Hannibal takes a sip of his own wine, turning his gaze onto the dusk. The light now is blue and fading like old jeans. “I don’t believe slapping you was justified. And for that, I am profoundly sorry, Beverly.”

Beverly swallows, then replies, “Yeah. It’s okay.”

They’re silent, for a little while. Somewhere, there are waves. Somewhere beyond that, there's nothing.

“Why did you try to run?” Hannibal asks at last.

Beverly snorts softly, looking over at him again. “Wouldn’t you try?”

“Perhaps.” He considers. “I would, yes. Undoubtedly. But I’m curious about why this time.”

“It was an impulse,” Beverly says. She shrugs her shoulders up, defensively, and leaves them there. “It was stupid. But I couldn’t help myself. It was p- it was like I was pulled.”

“But you knew that your attempt would only get so far.”

Beverly shakes her head. “It was like that moment you stand on the edge of a cliff and feel like you want to leap off. Like a little voice inside you is whispering _jump, jump, jump_.”

Hannibal frowns. “Do you often have impulsive thoughts like this?”

“Define ‘often.’ No. I don’t think so.”

“Was your decision to break into my house an impulsive one?”

“. . . Yeah. I suppose so.” She closes her eyes. “I mean, not entirely. I tried to think of another option, but I — couldn’t. I couldn’t accuse you without proof. It was break in and find proof or let you keep getting away with it. You’d been getting away with it for months already. If I waited . . . If I waited, the next person you killed would be on my conscience.”

“But now you find yourself here,” Hannibal point out.

“And you’re still killing people.” She opens her eyes. “I assume.”

Hannibal nods, to her surprise. “Yes.”

“Why do you kill people?” Beverly asks, her voice soft.

“The world tends to be in a better state after I kill someone than it was before.”

“Not for the person you killed. Or their families, their friends.”

Hannibal shrugs, taking a sip of his wine.

“So you see yourself as some kind of force for good, then?” she asks. “Ridding the world of the unworthy somehow? What did Cassie Boyle do that made her deserving of death?”

“Cassie Boyle’s death did serve a greater purpose. Her death gave Will Graham clarity. And that clarity, in turn, led him to locate and kill Garrett Jacob Hobbs. Is that not a worthy result?”

Beverly shuts her eyes again. The wine, or the fading adrenaline rush, or something is starting to make her feel fuzzy headed. Is it that, or is it Hannibal’s actual words that are starting to make sense to her?

“The ends justify the means?” she murmurs.

“Justification is only required if one believes in some form of absolute morality. If there is such thing as good and evil, even a spectrum of such, then an act such as killing another person, one who had done you no personal wrong, might be seen as evil. But is there such a thing as good and evil? Is there an absolute right and an absolute wrong, Beverly?”

“Killing someone is a bad thing.” Beverly pinches the bridge of her nose. “That feels like an absolute.”

“Yet you yourself have killed before.” Hannibal’s voice is soft, persistent. “You used deadly force against Eva Faus, in North Carolina. You’ve attacked me. Would you feel any remorse over killing me?”

“No — I, it’s not—”

“Even if it meant your freedom? A return to your life?”

Beverly hauls her eyelids open and focuses on Hannibal. It takes some effort. The light is almost gone from the sky, leaving his face and throat as a pale smudge in the dark.

“I don’t want to have to kill you,” she says. “But I would if I had to. If I had to.”

“And you would feel justified in the act. And with good reason. I’ve killed many more people than your previous victims. I’ve hurt you.”

“Killing you would hurt me.” She puts a hand up to her head. “I’d — regret it. What — what did you put in my drink?”

“Flunitrazepam.” Hannibal stands. Beverly’s gaze follows him, sluggishly. “You’ll feel fine after you sleep.”

“You roofied me,” she says, aghast, and tries to stand. It’s more of a lurch upright than anything. Her wine glass drops from her hand. It seems to take a long time for it to fall and hit the ground, to shatter and spill red liquid like arterial spray.

When Beverly starts to fall, she feels Hannibal’s hands catch her with the surety of a dancer. He scoops her off the floor, keeping her feet away from the broken glass. Her head lolls onto his shoulder. She thinks she says _You son of a bitch_ , but she’s not certain any of it comes out of her mouth.

After that

t h i n g s get

              a lit t l e

                          h      
                               a     
                                   z    
                                       y

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little Hannibal vs. Beverly violence; non-consensual drug use.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See end notes for content warnings.

 

t h i n g s get

              a lit t l e

 

 

                          h      
                               a     
                                   z    
                                       y

 

* * *

Beverly dreams that she’s standing in the middle of the ocean, maybe on an island and maybe just on the water, somehow. The waves splash and curl around her calves. Gray sky above. Clouds. Red sky on the horizon. Morning or night? Then a voice, sourceless—

  
“Can you hear me, Beverly?”

  
She tries to say _yes_ , but her mouth won't open. This doesn't bother her. She nods instead.

  
“Good. Tell me where you are.”

  
She dreams that she’s in the BAU lab. A body lies on the autopsy table, covered by a sheet, and she doesn’t want to go near. But she finds herself standing beside it anyway.

  
The sourceless voice is still murmuring around her, soothing as the sound of waves. Beverly turns away from the autopsy table, but there’s another one on her other side, also with a body. The tables stretch the length of the lab, each with a covered cadaver.

  
_Corpses are just clay_ , Beverly says. She moves down the line of tables, looking for identification. No toe tags or files: the only identifying marks on each body are pictograms stamped into the metal end of the table. _They don’t frighten me anymore. They used to. It used to feel like I was violating something when I cut into them. But I don’t think that anymore. They’re just vehicles. The important part of the person is already gone by the time they end up under my knife_.

  
She draws back the sheet covering one of the bodies; this table is marked with a pictogram of a snake. Alana Bloom lies beneath the sheet. Gray skin, open gray eyes, the Y-shaped incision on her chest stitched shut.

  
Just clay.

  
“What would you say to her if you could?”

  
(How did the Kaddish go? They said it for her grandparents, but it was so long ago. She can't remember the Aramaic, the rules that govern the prayer, can only remember being small and saying  _Amein_ with everyone else. And here, alone with death, she can only think,  _To which we say: Amein._ )

  
Beverly shakes her head and moves away from Alana's corpse. There's nothing _to_ say, is there, except _I'm sorry_ and _goodbye_.

  
The next table is marked with a lightning bolt. Beverly draws back the sheet to reveal Brian Zeller’s body. He ought to look surprised, or annoyed, Beverly thinks. Ought to have a joke perched behind his glued-together lips. Failing that, he ought to look peaceful. The dead ought to be peaceful.

  
He just looks empty. Dull eyes, dull hair, dull dust. Death doesn’t knock on the door.

  
_(To which we say: Amein.)_

  
Next table — a ream of paper stamped in the table — beneath the sheet, Mi-Young Lee-Katz. Her mother. She’s wearing her favorite pearl earrings, and Beverly is thankful that her eyes are closed.

  
_(Amein.)_

  
Table after table, friends and family, body after body. All empty houses now. _Clearance Sale, Everything Must Go. Closing Down — Thanks For The Memories!_

  
At some point, Beverly finds that her breath hitches every time she inhales; there are tears on her cheeks. This process of saying goodbye seems endless. Heartless. Timeless. Salt water sloshes around her ankles, drags at her steps, as she turns and walks to another slab. This one is marked with a knife.

  
She draws back the sheet to reveal Jack Crawford’s corpse. His eyes are closed. His face looks older like this, more tired. Sad.

  
“Do you have anything you want to say to him?”

  
_I thought you’d have found me by now_ , Beverly murmurs. _But I know he won’t let you. You’ll find me when he wants you to and not a second before._

  
She replaces the sheet with the same gentleness she’d use for her parents and turns to the last table. This one is stamped with an impossible cube, an Escherian construction. Water laps at her knees.

  
She draws back the sheet and isn’t very surprised to find Will Graham lying there. Like Jack, his eyes are closed. Even in death, he looks haggard, like a man plagued with bad dreams. Beverly sighs shakily, wipes her cheek with the back of her hand, and reaches out to brush a curl of Will’s hair back from his forehead.

  
_(Amein.)_

  
His eyes open and meet hers.

  
“You’re waking, now,” the voice around her says.

  
Under her fingers, Will starts to crumble and blow away like dust. It ought to be horrifying. His eyes stay on hers as he vanishes away, a sandcastle in a rising tide. The water reaches her waist.

  
“Waking, calm. Waking in a pleasant room.”

  
_(Amein.)_

  
“Safe.”

 

  
She wakes up to a sun-drenched room with off-white walls and stained-glass patterns on the bedspread. Hannibal Lecter is sitting at the foot of the bed, watching her wake. A bouquet of sweet-smelling flowers sits on the bedside table. Her eyes feel sandy, but otherwise, she feels fresh, like she's been asleep for a week.

“How do you feel?” he asks, as she blinks at him.

“. . . Rested?” she offers, a little hesitant. “I think—” She yawns, sitting up in bed. “I think I had a dream.”

He puts his head on one side, curious. “Good or bad?”

“Can’t remember.” She covers another yawn and stretches. “You making breakfast?”

Hannibal smiles. “But of course. What would you like?”

 

* * *

And what day is it today? Sunday? Yesterday? The last day of winter?

Does it matter?

A bottle of wine, shared between the two of them. The slanting light of sunset. Hannibal in his chair, Beverly across from him, feeling loose-limbed and heavy.

“Is this therapy or just happy hour?” Beverly wonders. Out loud, she’s fairly sure. Sometimes during these evenings she loses track of what's said and what's thought.

“What was your childhood like?” Hannibal asks.

“Which part of it?” Beverly shoots back. “It was pretty much fine, as childhoods go. Stable, you know? Mom and Dad loved each other. We moved once when I was ten, but in the same town. No big disasters, just a big family.”

“How big?”

This is why Beverly gets confused about whether they’re having pleasant chats or if Hannibal has some ulterior therapeutic motive. His questions are sometimes interested, conversational; other times they have that leading, neutral tone of a doctor or an interrogator trying to bring you to a particular conclusion.

“Mom, Dad, me, my brother and my little sister. And a couple of dogs over the years. There was always a pet. I think that was Dad’s idea. He felt like it completed the picture. Mom only put up with it because she didn’t have to do any of the dog walking or training.”

“You were the eldest child?”

“Yeah. Two years between me and my brother, six between me and my sister.”

“Did you have a good relationship with your siblings?”

Beverly smiles sadly. “Mostly. My brother and I fought a lot when we were younger, the way brothers and sisters do. We were really competitive. But then when my sister came along, he was mostly competing for attention with her. And we calmed down by the time we were both in high school.”

“In many Asian cultures boys are valued more highly than girls — more rights to inheritance, more responsibilities to the family.”

Beverly gives Hannibal an unimpressed look. “Yeah, sure. But Mom didn’t buy into that, though. She bucked a lot of traditions. She moved away from home and married a Jewish boy from New York. She was happy when she had a son, yeah, but she wasn’t about to play favorites. And Dad just thought it was great to have two girls. He figured we were less trouble than boys.”

“How did your brother feel about that?”

“He didn’t find out about it until we were all adults. And then it was a big family joke, because he probably caused a lot less trouble than either of us girls did. Great grades, never snuck out, one girlfriend all the way through college . . .” She trails off as a thought strikes her.

Hannibal waits for her to continue, and finally prompts her. “What are you thinking about?”

“I wonder if they’re engaged yet,” Beverly murmurs. “He was talking about it . . . He was going to get her a ring out of one of those, one of those, like, gumball coin dispensers, something really cheap and chintzy, because their first date was at a pizza place, the kind of place where they've got temporary tattoos and costume jewelry and all that shit. And he couldn’t figure out when to give it to her.” She blinks — her eyes are wet — and focuses on Hannibal. “How long have I been here?”

Hannibal shakes his head. Off-limits question.

“Am I ever going to see him again?” She swallows. “I’m not going to see him get married, am I.”

“That remains to be seen,” Hannibal says gently. “The future is not set in stone — not yours, nor mine, nor anyone’s.”

”I used to find that kind of uncertainty comforting.”

“And now?”

Beverly shrugs, wipes her eyes, and sips her wine. “Nothing at all is certain anymore. I feel fairly certain the sun is going to go down and it’s going to come up tomorrow. I feel fairly certain I’ll wake up tomorrow and you’ll be gone. I feel fairly certain I’ll wake up tomorrow, period. But I don’t know anymore.” Hannibal is more shadow than person, now, with the setting sun glinting off the water behind him, stingingly bright. She closes her eyes. “Maybe I’ll wake up with you in my room. Maybe the sun is falling into the sea and going out and it’ll never come up again. I’ll wake up to night and cold. Maybe you poisoned me at dinner and I’ll never wake up again.”

“When I kill you, Beverly,” Hannibal murmurs, his voice drifting to her ears, “it will not be with something as vulgar as poison. I wouldn’t do that to the food.”

“Your priorities are really out of whack,” Beverly mutters, her eyes still closed. “Poison wouldn’t be so bad. I could go in my sleep.”

“Your death deserves something more than that. You deserve to look it in the face, not have it come creeping up to you like a thief. You should face it fighting, as you did before.”

Beverly opens her eyes. Hannibal hasn’t moved, but the sun has. The bottom edge of the sun’s disc is touching the water now, and she can see Hannibal’s face a little more clearly through the glare.

“When you kill me, you’ll face me. Is that what you’re saying?”

Hannibal nods. “I have the utmost respect for you, Beverly. It would be discourteous of me to kill you as if you were anyone else.”

“Would you kill me without pain?”

“Are you afraid of pain?”

Beverly swallows, nods. “I guess I am. Of useless pain. Survivable pain is one thing. Sometimes pain means you’re still alive to experience it. Pain you’re not going to live through, pain that you’re only experiencing on the way to death — what’s the point of that?”

Hannibal nods again, slowly this time, as if in thought. “I see.”

Sure you do, Beverly says, only inside her head, she thinks. Sometimes it’s hard to tell these days. She lifts her glass and takes a larger swallow of the wine. “I don’t want to talk about death anymore,” she says.

Hannibal lifts his own wine. “As you like. This is your time.”

Beverly rolls her eyes. “Hannibal, do you even hear yourself when you say stuff like that? I mean, you understand that’s not true? How it sounds when you tell the woman you’re keeping prisoner that anything is hers?”

“Nevertheless,” Hannibal says with a faint smile. “In a situation in which you have very little control, you can take control in this time.”

She snorts and holds out her glass. “If this is my time, then I’d like another glass of wine, please.”

Chuckling, Hannibal rises and picks up the bottle of wine, brings it over to refill her glass. “Your brother has a girlfriend, then. What about your sister?”

“My sister is married,” Beverly says, gesturing that the glass is full enough. “First one in the family. She’s got a little boy and a little girl. Kevin and Anna. They’re the sweetest kids.”

“And what about you?” Hannibal returns to his seat and crosses his legs. “Have you ever considered marriage?”

Beverly shakes her head _no_. “It never made a lot of sense. I was in school, and then I was working, and the Bureau — it makes it hard to maintain a relationship if you don’t have one coming in. There’s a lot of intra-agency dating, office romance, that kind of thing. You know — did you know in the CIA they actually encourage people to date their co-workers?”

“I had no idea.” Hannibal raises his eyebrows. “Does the FBI do the same?”

“Not as a policy. It just tends to happen sometimes.”

“The strongest relationships are often based on common interests, shared experience. It’s no surprise that within a rarefied environment like the FBI, like attracts like.” He inclines his head towards her. “Did you ever have any office romances?”

She considers him for a moment, then shrugs slightly and tells him with a smile, “I dated Brian Zeller for a little while.”

She bursts into laughter when Hannibal looks surprised, even though it’s the mildest of expressions — an arched eyebrow, a slight shift in his seat. Seeing Hannibal Lecter even a little taken aback is such a rare occurrence that she can’t help being delighted. “What? You really never picked up on that? I figured if anyone would—”

“I certainly knew you and your colleagues were close.” Hannibal is smiling, somewhere between indulgent and self-deprecating. “Your rapport is obvious to anyone who comes into your lab. But I never speculated that it might be more than that.”

“ _Will_ probably knew,” Beverly muses. “That’s the kind of thing he’d pick up on. Whether we wanted him to or not. Whether _he_ wanted to or not,” she amends.

“Will’s perception is often a burden to him.”

“Yeah.” She sighs. “I wished I could have helped him. But . . . I don’t know.”

“You wanted to help him,” Hannibal prompts.

“I cared about him. It was pretty clear pretty fast nothing was going to happen between us, but — he was a good friend, still.”

Hannibal is silent for a moment before saying, “He is a good friend.”

Beverly shrugs. “I don’t have any friends anymore. Just you.”

“And I am not your friend.”

“Is that a question or a statement of fact?” she asks.

“Which do you think?”

“I think you’re not my friend, no.” Beverly examines his face in the twilight, then looks past him to the ocean. “What was your family like?”

Another silence. Outside in the dusk, a sea-bird of some kind floats past on the wind, then folds its wings and dives out sight.

“I had a younger sister, as well.”

Beverly looks back to him, faintly surprised. “Had?”

“She died when we were both children.”

“What was her name?”

“Mischa.”

The name is weighted with so much sadness and pain that Beverly’s breath catches. She almost wants to hold out a hand to Hannibal, offer him some little gesture of sympathy. “What was she like?”

Hannibal takes a breath. “She was a loving child. I was very protective of her. I would rather have suffered any pain myself than see her come to harm.”

“But she died,” Beverly says quietly. “How?”

“She was killed.”

Beverly watches him for a moment before observing, “You don’t like talking about it.”

“No,” he admits. “I imagine scenarios where I could have done something differently, somehow. Saved her. I imagine a universe where she survived and she was never taken from me.”

“You talk about her as if she was part of you.”

“She was,” he says simply. “I feel her absence in the world daily, as if she were a lost limb. Just as you feel the absence of your ear, no doubt.”

“The loss of a loved one is a little different than the loss of a limb. Or” — she waves at the side of her head, the gesture languid as a slow river — “an extremity. You can replace a body part, at least with a facs— facsimile. You can’t replace a person like that.”

“What if it were possible?” Hannibal asks. “What if, just beyond our senses, there were another universe, another timeline where all our loved ones existed, alive and well? What if we could draw them into our own world?”

Beverly shakes her head and affects a stoner’s drawl. “That’s heavy, man.” She arches her eyebrows. “That’s a lot more new agey than I’d have expected from you, Dr. Lecter.”

“The idea of multiple realities is hardly new,” Hannibal points out with an indulgent smile. “Nor metaphysical. On the one hand, the Norse believed in their nine realms. Dante described four connected worlds, each with multiple levels of their own. On the other hand, Stephen Hawking proposes the many worlds theory with observable science to back him up.”

“So it’s not metaphysical, it’s quantum physical.”

He inclines his head, amused. “Just so.”

“If you could bring your sister back from that parallel universe, would you?”

“Unquestionably. If you could reach into another world, another set of probabilities, and bring through a change, what would it be?”

Beverly mulls this over for a few minutes, sipping her wine, and finally decides, “I’d bring through the probability where I killed you that first night.”

There’s no animosity in her tone, and Hannibal’s smile widens. Beverly returns it, rueful.

“Just so,” he says again, softly. “Now, Beverly, why don’t you close your eyes? And count backwards with me. Ten, nine . . .”

“Eight, seven,” Beverly counts, closing her eyes and sinking into his voice. “Six . . .”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Non-consensual drug use; hypnotism; death imagery including familiar death; angst. So, you know. _Hannibal_.


End file.
